Pulvirenti, Jaquiss and Lalor, ‘The “Asylum Partnership” Memorandum of Understanding with Rwanda and LGBTQI+ Asylum Seekers’, 2024

Rossella Pulvirenti, Catherine Jaquiss and Kay Lalor, ‘The “Asylum Partnership” Memorandum of Understanding with Rwanda and LGBTQI+ Asylum Seekers: an analysis of vulnerability in the Equality Impact Assessment and the European Convention on Human Rights’, 2024 Journal of Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Law 38(1) 16–31

Abstract

This paper analyses the compatibility of the Memorandum of Understanding with Rwanda (MoU) with the UK’s international and domestic obligations towards LGBTQI+ people seeking asylum. It argues that the understanding of vulnerability and identity deployed in the MoU, the Rwanda Policy, and to a great extent, in legal challenges to removals to Rwanda, was limited, often operating as a hierarchical tool of governance, with little sensitivity to the structural components of how vulnerability interacts with identity. Drawing upon a close reading of the protections afforded to vulnerable groups and LGBTQI+ individuals within arts 3, 5, 6, and 14, of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), the paper suggests that although the European Court of Human Rights continues to use the language of vulnerability in a top-down manner that ascribes relatively little agency to those who are vulnerable, it does offer a framework for setting out a more robust and expansive framework of state responsibilities towards those who are deemed vulnerable within the asylum system. As such the ECHR offers a valuable route for demanding a more structured and nuanced approach towards the obligations owed to LGBTQI+ and other vulnerable people seeking asylum.