{"id":4054,"date":"2026-03-08T19:18:42","date_gmt":"2026-03-08T19:18:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/iranians.global\/news\/?p=4054"},"modified":"2026-03-08T19:46:35","modified_gmt":"2026-03-08T19:46:35","slug":"the-most-radical-part-of-reforms-deportation-plans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/iranians.global\/news\/the-most-radical-part-of-reforms-deportation-plans\/","title":{"rendered":"The most radical part of Reform\u2019s deportation plans"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Peter William Walsh, Researcher, The Migration Observatory, University of Oxford<\/strong><\/a> <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\n

Speaking to the press in an airport hangar near Oxford on August 26, the leader of Reform UK, Nigel Farage, unveiled his party\u2019s new policy on mass deportations.<\/p>\n

There are many elements to the policy, but fundamentally it is a decision to abandon the UK\u2019s decades-long commitment not to send people to places where they may face torture or death.<\/p>\n

At the heart of the global asylum system is one basic principle: countries must not send people to places where they face serious threats to their life or freedom. This rule \u2013 known as the principle of \u201cnon-refoulement\u201d \u2013 derives from the 1951 Refugee Convention but also appears in other human rights laws and agreements. It is why European countries, including the UK, assess asylum claims even when people have arrived without authorisation.<\/p>\n

\u201cLook, I can\u2019t be responsible for despotic regimes all over the world,\u201d said<\/a> Farage, defending the policy in The Times, adding that his responsibility is to the \u201csafety of women and girls on our streets\u201d rather than to those who have entered the UK without permission.<\/p>\n

The UK was instrumental in drafting both the European Convention on Human Rights<\/a> and the 1951 Refugee Convention<\/a>. For the UK to effectively remove itself from these treaties raises significant questions about whether other states would follow suit, and what sort of protections would exist for persecuted people around the world in the future.<\/p>\n

What is Reform proposing?<\/h2>\n

The plan is indeed, as Farage described, radical. Its main aim is to \u201cdetain and deport all illegal migrants\u201d over one parliament. To make this possible, the plan, branded Operation Restoring Justice<\/a>, entails leaving the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), repealing the UK\u2019s Human Rights Act, and \u201cdisapplying\u201d for five years the Refugee Convention and other international agreements that could prevent deportations. <\/p>\n

Further, it would greatly expand detention on repurposed military sites, and scale up charter flights for the removal of \u201cup to 600,000\u201d people without the right to be in the UK.<\/p>\n

The policy reflects a major departure from the 75-year postwar consensus in Europe that countries should not send people to countries where they could face persecution.<\/p>\n

Legal and practical hurdles<\/h2>\n

Reform\u2019s policy, if implemented, is likely to attract legal challenges. However, as the parliamentary battle over the last government\u2019s Rwanda deportation plan demonstrated<\/a>, the government has considerable power to prevent the courts from having their say. Leaving the ECHR, repealing the Human Rights Act and removing all references to non-refoulement in domestic law would make the policy possible, from a legal perspective.<\/p>\n

This would not happen overnight. It could take more than a year for Reform\u2019s illegal migration (mass deportation) bill to become law, given that Reform will command no majority in the House of Lords, where the policy is liable to attract strong resistance. Leaving the ECHR requires just six months\u2019 notice \u2013 but would probably also require the consent of parliament<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The bigger practical hurdles are logistical and diplomatic. Reform proposes to increase detention spaces to 24,000 within 18 months. As of mid-2024, the most recent available data, detention capacity stood at an estimated 2,200<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The UK\u2019s current system for removals operates at a fraction of the scale Reform envisages. In the year ending June 30 2025, there were around 9,000 enforced returns<\/a> and 27,000 voluntary ones. Removing hundreds of thousands of people over five years would require a huge expansion of interior immigration enforcement. It also remains unclear how Reform would identify hundreds of thousands of people living in the UK without permission.<\/p>\n

Consent from receiving countries (the countries to where people would be deported) is a longstanding barrier to deportations. If a country does not recognise their citizens or refuses to take them back, they cannot be returned<\/a>. <\/p>\n

The government\u2019s recent experience shows documentation and country cooperation are the main practical limits on enforced returns. Questions remain over whether, or on what terms<\/a>, Afghanistan and Iran would agree to take back their citizens.<\/p>\n

Reform has anticipated this potential issue by proposing to pay countries to take back their citizens, or impose sanctions on those that don\u2019t.<\/p>\n

Should this not work, Reform\u2019s Plan B would be to deport people to \u201csafe third countries\u201d, a la Rwanda. Plan C: sending people to British Overseas Territories like Ascension Island, something the previous Conservative government was reported<\/a> to have looked at internally and rejected on feasibility and cost grounds.<\/p>\n

\n
\"Zia<\/div>
\n Reform\u2019s proposals include several deportation flights a day.<\/span>
\n Tolga Akmen\/EPA-EFE<\/a><\/span>
\n <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Reform estimates that the policy would save over \u00a37 billion in five years. In truth, the policy is so radical that it is impossible to cost with any degree of precision.<\/p>\n

What is clearer is that any net saving would depend critically on how many people the policy deters from crossing in small boats. Currently, small boat arrivals and a large asylum backlog generate annual government spending of over \u00a34 billion<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Managing the asylum system has become increasingly challenging over the last decade, as numbers of both unauthorised arrivals and asylum claims have risen rapidly, and the cost of the asylum system has skyrocketed.<\/p>\n

However, the most significant part of Reform\u2019s announcement is not the detail, but the essence. It proposes ending the principle of refugee protection \u2013 accepting that people would be sent to countries where they could be tortured or killed, as a means of reducing unauthorised migration and cutting the costs of the asylum system.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

<\/p>\n

This article written by Peter William Walsh, Researcher, The Migration Observatory, University of Oxford<\/strong> and is republished from The Conversation<\/a> under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Peter William Walsh, Researcher, The Migration Observatory, University of Oxford Speaking to the press in an airport hangar near Oxford on August 26, the leader of Reform UK, Nigel Farage, unveiled his party\u2019s new policy on mass deportations. There are many elements to the policy, but fundamentally it is a decision to abandon the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":179,"featured_media":4055,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_topic_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_reply_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"inline_featured_image":false,"fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[117],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4054","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-editorials"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/iranians.global\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4054","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/iranians.global\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/iranians.global\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iranians.global\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/179"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iranians.global\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4054"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/iranians.global\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4054\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iranians.global\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4055"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/iranians.global\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4054"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iranians.global\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4054"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iranians.global\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4054"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}