Legal and human rights experts on Tuesday said the British Conservative Party’s decision to push through a bill allowing the government to deport asylum-seekers to Rwanda — feffectively overriding last year’s Supreme Court ruling — represented a “desperate low” from lawmakers eager to exploit migrants ahead of elections expected later this year.

“A lot of this is performative cruelty,” Daniel Merriman, a lawyer whose clients have included some asylum-seekers whom the Tories tried to deport after it first introduced its plan in 2022, told NPR. “The elephant in the room is the upcoming election.”

After a prolonged debate, the unelected House of Lords cleared the way to pass the Safety of Rwanda bill early Tuesday morning, after dropping several proposed amendments including one that would have required independent verification that the central African country is a safe place to send migrants.

The House of Commons then passed the bill, and King Charles III is expected to formally approve the legislation in the coming days.

The bill requires courts and immigration officials to “conclusively treat the Republic of Rwanda as a safe country” to send asylum-seekers, even though the Supreme Court ruled in November that people deported to the country would face a significant risk of refoulement, or being sent back to the countries where they originally fled persecution or violence.

The Conservative government signed a treaty with Rwanda last December to strengthen protections for asylum-seekers, including a provision that partially bans Rwanda from sending people back to their home........

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