BELFAST: A High Court judge in Belfast on Monday ruled that a UK law allowing asylum-seekers to be deported to Rwanda should be disapplied in Northern Ireland on human rights grounds.
Judge Michael Humphreys ruled in favour of separate challenges to the legislation that creates powers to detain asylum-seekers and remove them from the United Kingdom to the east African state.
The challenges were mounted by the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission (NIHRC) and a 16-year-old boy from Iran who travelled to the UK alone in a bid to claim asylum.
NIHRC lawyers argued that the Illegal Migration Act breaches the UK’s domestic and international obligations under a deal signed by London and the European Union that governs post-Brexit arrangements in Northern Ireland.
That deal, called the Windsor Framework, guaranteed there would be no reduction of rights safeguarded by Northern Ireland’s 1998 Good Friday Agreement that ended decades of sectarian conflict — even if that meant that the British province’s laws differed from the rest of the UK.
The judge found that several parts of the Illegal Migration Act reduced the rights of asylum-seekers in Northern Ireland under the terms of the peace accord.
The case brought against the UK also alleged there were violations of a series of rights protected by the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), to which London remains a signatory.
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