AMNESTY International has condemned the row between Westminster and Ireland over asylum-seekers as an “unedifying spectacle.”
Over the weekend, Ireland and Britain were divided on a post-Brexit EU deal to allow asylum-seekers whose applications are “inadmissible” to be returned to Britain and vice versa.
Justice Minister Helen McEntee said there was a significant increase in the number of asylum-seekers arriving in Ireland from across the six-counties border.
Irish premier Simon Harris said on Sunday that Ireland will not “provide a loophole” for other countries’ migration “challenges,” while Mr Sunak said he was “not interested” in any returns deal if the EU does not allow Britain to deport asylum-seekers who had crossed the English Channel to France.
Mr Harris claimed that the British government today confirmed an “operating agreement” for sending people between both jurisdictions.
In a joint statement, Amnesty International UK and Amnesty International Ireland’s chief executives Sacha Deshmukh and Stephen Bowen said that both governments “pointing fingers at each other” rather than addressing asylum claims is a “deeply unedifying spectacle that harms both the international refugee system and the people the system is there to protect.”
The statement said: “The UK is currently acting as an international freeloader in refugee matters, expecting other countries to process people’s asylum claims when it flat out refuses to do so itself.
“If the Irish government also ignores the needs and rights of people the UK is abusing, it will only make itself complicit in the UK's hypocrisy.
“All countries must accept their international obligations to people seeking asylum on their soil — one country’s refusal to do so cannot justify another to follow suit.
“The Irish government — as well as the EU and the wider international community — should not mimic the UK but instead apply sustained pressure on the UK for it to abandon its shameful policy of threatening people seeking asylum with perpetual limbo or expulsion to Rwanda.”
