Priti Patel’s UK immigration plans suffered a major blow recently as EU countries snubbed bilateral agreements with Britain to facilitate the deportation of refugees to Europe. New plans unveiled by the Home Secretary in March would see refugees arriving in the UK legally denied the automatic right to asylum.
Instead, the new measures would see those seeking asylum forcibly removed to safe countries that they had passed through on route to Britain, nations that are often in the European Union.
The Home Office has stated that it intends to ‘replace the Dublin regulation’, which allowed the UK to return asylum seekers to EU member states while Britain was still part of the bloc under ‘bilateral returns arrangements’.