Six joined judicial review claims challenging the Home Secretary’s removal to Rwanda of asylum seekers, under the UK-Rwanda deal, are to be heard by the Divisional Court on Monday 5 September 2022 – Friday 9 September 2022.
Christopher Knight is instructed in R (AAA & others) v Secretary of State for the Home Department by Duncan Lewis on behalf six individual asylum seekers, a trade union (the PCSU) and two immigration-specialist NGOs (Detention Action and Care 4 Calais).
The claim raises a series of challenges both to the lawfulness of the decisions to remove the individual claimants to Rwanda, and to certify their human rights claims as clearly unfounded, but also to the decision of the Home Secretary to assess Rwanda as being, in general, a safe third country in which a claim for asylum will be considered consistently with the Refugee Convention and with Article 3 ECHR.
In August, Christopher represented the AAA claimants in responding to the Government’s attempt to seek public interest immunity over various comments of a Foreign Office official about human rights violations in Rwanda and successfully opposed the majority of that PII application: R (AAA & others) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2022] EWHC 2191 (Admin).
Judgment is not expected until November 2022, as other claims raising additional challenges to the implementation of the UK-Rwanda deal will be heard in early October by the same Court, with judgment to be handed down at the same time.
