James Cleverly makes Rwanda vow as Lord Sumption queries plan

Home Secretary James Cleverly has defended emergency laws to revive plans to fly asylum seekers to Rwanda, as a former Supreme Court justice said the measures would be extraordinary.

Lord Sumption said the move "won't make any difference" after the Supreme Court ruled the policy was unlawful.

Mr Cleverly disagreed with the criticism and said a new treaty with Rwanda would allow flights to depart.

He did not deny previously describing the Rwanda policy as "batshit".

In their ruling on Wednesday, the Supreme Court justices said there were "substantial grounds" to believe the Rwandan government could deport people sent to the country to places where they would be unsafe.

After the ruling, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak rejected calls to drop the plans and said he was working on a new treaty that would prevent genuine refugees from being sent back to where they had fled from.

Facing pressure from Tory MPs on the right of his party, Mr Sunak promised to "do what is necessary" to enact the Rwanda policy, including changing UK laws.

Mr Cleverly told the BBC the government was in the "final stages" of agreeing the new treaty with Rwanda.

When asked when flights would take off, the home secretary said: "We are working to make sure we can do that some time in the new year. We're keeping to the timescale we originally proposed."

Mr Cleverly claimed MPs could vote to approve the treaty once it was agreed and pass new laws within days.

But many expect a new treaty to be challenged in the courts and Tory MPs will be demanding more detail on how the government thinks it can bypass human rights laws and international conventions.

The Supreme Court made it clear in its judgment that domestic legislation, as well as international treaties, were relevant to its decision to rule the Rwanda scheme unlawful.

With a general election expected next year, time is running out to changes laws and pass legislation, which can take months.

Writing in the Daily Telegraph, former home secretary Priti Patel said she expected the government's attempts "may prove to be harder and longer to implement than suggested".

"Both those options risk being bogged down in Parliament, especially in the House of Lords, and again in the courts," she wrote. "Claims of a quick solution are sometimes easier said than done, but will have my support in being pursued."

Lord Sumption, a former justice of the Supreme Court, told The Today Podcast on BBC Sounds the "profoundly discreditable" plan to use a law to declare Rwanda as safe was "constitutionally really quite extraordinary".

He argued it would "effectively overrule a decision on the facts, on the evidence, by the highest court in the land".

"I've never heard of a situation in which parliament intervenes to declare the facts - the safety or unsafety of Rwanda - to change the facts from those that have been declared by the courts to be correct," he said.

"The courts have perused hundreds of pages of documents to reach this decision. For Parliament simply to say the facts are different would be constitutionally really quite extraordinary."

The prime minister is facing calls to withdraw the UK from the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), an international treaty.

Mr Cleverly played down the possibility of the UK leaving the ECHR, which ensures human rights cases can be heard at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France.

The first Rwanda flight was scheduled to depart in June 2022 but was cancelled after an intervention from the European Court of Human Rights.

When asked if the government was prepared to leave the ECHR treaty, Mr Cleverly replied: "I don't believe that will be necessary. I believe we can act in accordance with international law and we are very determined to do that."

He did not deny having previously called the Rwanda policy "batshit", saying "I don't remember a conversation like that", and claiming the question was a Labour "trap".