"Make it so"

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It is a cornerstone of the English constitution that Parliament has absolute sovereignty over all things, and was granted that sovereignty by the monarch acting in the name of god. The unshakeable belief in the truth of that proposition can lead feeble-minded MPs into a mindset where parliament merely has to declare something to be so for it to become so. As an example of that, the last-but-one Prime Minister has come up with what he clearly thinks is a wizard wheeze to unblock the route to deporting people to Rwanda. He’s suggested that parliament should simply deem Rwanda to be a safe place, and that the judges will then be obliged to agree. The relevant legislation already contains a list of countries deemed to be safe, and adding Rwanda to the list will suffice, in his view, to over-rule those judges who keep insisting that the government should abide by the law requiring the UK to ensure the safety of any deported asylum-seeker.

If he’d given it a moment’s thought (admittedly, not one of his known strengths), he’d have realised that that will never satisfy the judges. All the countries on the list currently have had some sort of assessment before reaching the conclusion that they are safe, and it’s at least probable that judges would expect to see evidence of a similar process (rather than simply parliamentary arbitrariness) for any additions. Most people would understand that adding, say, North Korea or Belarus to the list wouldn’t magically make them safe countries, whatever parliament says; Rwanda may be slightly more arguable, but the principle is the same. And being safe at the time that a country is added to the list cannot, in any event, absolve the judges from making an assessment as to safety as and when they consider an individual case – it’s why we have judges and courts to consider individual cases rather than mechanistic rules. Still, oversimplistic solutions to complex issues and a detached-from-reality belief in the exceptional nature of the UK are not exactly unknown when it comes to Johnson (see, for example, Brexit). And it’s another stick with which his acolytes could beat the judiciary.