Not Quite Asylum Seekers

There are in Britain at this moment, it appears, up to several immigrants with whom the Home Office has no problem. Two of them are Charles Munyaneza and Célestin Ugirashebuja, who are fifty-fourth and ninety-third on the Rwandan prosecutor general's list of a hundred suspected participants in the 1994 atrocity which, as Mark Curtis has pointed out, John Major's government did much to facilitate. Among other services to the slaughterers, the British ambassador proposed, as the party got under way, that the UN peacekeeping force in Rwanda be reduced by about 90%; and in April 1994 Britain drafted a UN resolution which rejected the use of the term "genocide" as a description of what was going on. Had the term been used, intervention would have been not only legal (unlike some other interventions I might mention) but obligatory.

However, genocide suspects are not among the sorts of suspect whom the Vicar of Downing Street has promised to harry, hassle and hound out of the country. Accordingly, the Home Office has dismissed the warrant which the Rwandan government issued three months ago for Munyaneza's arrest, on the grounds that "the UK does not have an extradition treaty with Rwanda and police were under no obligation to visit the suspects". Due process is back in fashion, it seems; for some of us, at least.