Rishi Sunak’s plan to send migrants to Rwanda has been torn apart in a damning new assessment from the right wing of the party.
This comes just a day before a crucial vote on his new legislation.
Lawyers acted on behalf of five groups of Conservative MPs – the European Research Group, the New Conservatives, the Common Sense Group, the Northern Research Group and the Conservative Growth Group.
They warned that the Bill provides a “partial and incomplete solution to the problem of legal chellenges”, saying it does not “go far enough to deliver the policy as intended”.
WATCH: James Cleverly unveils the Government’s new plan to send migrants to Rwanda
The document, which lists 13 “limitations” of the legislation, warns the Bill “contains no restrictions on the bringing of legal challenges against removal to Rwanda based on grounds other than that Rwanda is not a safe country”.
It also claims there is “nothing in the Bill which would prevent the UK courts from following or being influenced by a final ruling of the Strasbourg Court on a case where the Bill does not expressly preclude them from doing so”.
Sunak has been warned that, once in Rwanda, an asylum seeker “will be able to appeal any previous decisions based on new evidence”.
However, the group is yet to confirm how it will advise its MPs to vote.
There is a chance it could choose to vote for the bill tomorrow, in order to make amendments at its next stage.
But it is understood that the ERG-led coalition of Tory factions wants Sunak to toughen up the Bill before it faces a vote tomorrow.
The group said the legislation would “require very significant amendments, some of which would potentially be outside the current title’s scope,”.
They said: “In summary, the Bill overall provides a partial and incomplete solution to the problem of legal challenges in the UK courts being used as stratagems to delay or defeat the removal of illegal migrants to Rwanda.
“The Prime Minister may well be right when he claims that this is the ‘toughest piece of migration legislation ever put forward by a UK Government’, but we do not believe that it goes far enough to deliver the policy as intended.
“Resolving, comprehensively, the issues raised by this analysis would require very significant amendments, some of which would potentially be outside the current title’s scope, and the final Bill would look very different.”
