The UK Home Office announced on Saturday that it plans to install electronic tracking devices on asylum seekers who have arrived in the country via “unnecessary and dangerous” routes.
The ministry stressed that the program will be tested for 12 months and aims to “improve and maintain contact” with asylum seekers.
According to the public channel BBC, the first to be subjected to this follow-up will be the asylum seekers who should have been sent to Rwanda this week and whose deportation was blocked by the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR).
A ministry spokesman said at least one of these seven asylum seekers must be released by court order and assured that electronic devices will be used “when appropriate”.
In an interview with the newspaper “The Telegraph”, the Minister of the Interior, Priti Patel, criticized the “scandalous” decision of the ECtHR, an international court in the jurisdiction of the Council of Europe.
“We have to look at the motivations. Why did they make this decision? Was it politically motivated? In my opinion, of course,” said the minister, who accused the court’s “opacity”.
“We don’t know who the judges were, who was on the panel [de decisão]. We didn’t actually get a sentence, just a press release and a letter saying we can’t transfer these people,” he said.
This week, a spokesperson for British Prime Minister Boris Johnson left open the possibility that the United Kingdom might decide to abandon the European Convention on Human Rights, by which it is bound to the jurisdiction of the ECtHR, and underlined that “all options are in the table”.
Attorney General Suella Braverman said the executive is “definitely open to considering all options” regarding what his “future relationship” with the Strasbourg court should look like.
The British Government intends to send asylum seekers to Rwanda, which it considers to have entered the UK illegally.
It will be the African country that will evaluate your requests, giving them refuge on its territory if they are accepted, or, if not, will process your deportation to your country of origin.