Making a Country the Court Called “Dangerous” Legally “Safe”: Peak Burikasu?

Dealing with illegal immigration is a difficult problem in every country.

Refusing entry can become a human rights issue. Yet no country can accept everyone who wants to enter. Attempts at deportation, meanwhile, can lead to court cases.

Britain once proposed a remarkably interesting policy in response to this dilemma.

“Then let us send them to another country.”

In 2022, the British government announced a plan to transfer asylum seekers and others who had entered through illegal routes to Rwanda in Africa.

Rwanda would examine the asylum claims of those transferred, and successful applicants would live there. In return, Britain would pay Rwanda a substantial amount of money.

In other words, Britain would move its immigration problem abroad, while Rwanda would receive financial assistance.

It sounded less like immigration policy than international outsourcing.

If the Court Stops You, Change the Law

The plan, however, had a major problem.

In 2023, the UK Supreme Court ruled that the transfer plan was unlawful.

The reason was that Rwanda’s asylum system had serious problems and that people sent there might be returned to countries where they faced persecution.

Normally, this would be the point at which a government reconsidered the plan.

The British government took a different approach.

It signed a new treaty with Rwanda and then enacted the Safety of Rwanda Act in 2024.

After the court ruled that Rwanda could not be considered safe, the government attempted to make it a “safe country” by law.

It was an extraordinarily bold idea.

If a court examines the evidence and concludes that a country cannot be considered safe, Parliament can simply decide that it is safe.

The government explained that the new treaty had improved safety. The law, however, also required courts to treat Rwanda as a safe country.

At that point, the issue began to look less like a human rights dispute and more like a philosophical question about which is superior: law or reality.

If the law declares a place safe, does it actually become safe?

If so, a recession could be ended by passing a law declaring the economy strong, and inflation could be solved by legally declaring prices low.

Politics would become a remarkably easy profession.

Japanese internet slang includes the word burikasu, an insult directed at Britain. It carries the nuance of “gentlemanly, law-abiding scum.”

This was burikasu in its finest form.

How Many People Were Ultimately Transferred?

After devising such a large-scale plan, signing a treaty, and even passing a law, Britain must surely have achieved impressive results.

So what happened?

The number of people forcibly transferred was zero.

The government changed in July 2024, and the new Starmer administration abolished the plan.

Four people did travel to Rwanda under a separate voluntary relocation program, but that was different from the original forced-transfer plan.

Meanwhile, an enormous amount of public money had been spent on the project.

The money crossed the sea before any people did.

A Cautionary Example for Japan

What, then, should Japan learn from this policy?

The answer is not to imitate Britain.

Once a person has been admitted, various issues arise involving residence status, asylum applications, and deportation. Removal then becomes difficult, so the government tries paying a third country to accept the person instead.

When a court stops the plan, the government declares the destination a “safe country” by law.

Rather than taking such a circuitous route, it would be more consistent to enforce immigration controls from the beginning and create a system that prevents the entry of people who should not be admitted.

The decision should be made at the point of entry, rather than inventing strange arguments to remove people afterward. That is the lesson Japan should learn.

Britain spent an enormous amount of taxpayers’ money trying to transfer migrants overseas, yet ultimately transferred no one by force.

The law could create a “safe country,” but it could not actually transfer anyone there.

In the end, it was not the migrants who crossed the sea, but British taxpayers’ money.