Conservative Party deputy chair Lee Anderson is demanding answers as it emerged that the UN is sending Afghan schoolgirls to Rwanda, after it said it was unsafe for the UK to send Channel migrants to the east African country.
Female pupils from the School of Leadership Afghanistan have been relocated to Kigali, the Rwandan capital, after the Taliban ruled that only boys could receive secondary education. Prior to escaping to Rwanda, the school’s teachers torched the school and with it destroyed any documents that would point to the identities of the escaped pupils.
As a result, the parents of the children that were hurried to east Africa are not in as much danger of meeting the brutality of the Taliban. The MailOnline reports the president of the Afghan school Shabana Basij-Rasikh as saying: “On the night we arrived in Kigali, we were met by a group of Rwandan trauma counsellors who invited us to belong [in their country].”
The girls are still in Rwanda and are being educated there, thanks to assistance from the UN. However, Mr Anderson’s urgent query comes after the same body slammed the British Government for attempting to send illegal migrants to the very same country, on the premise that it was unsafe.
The British Supreme Court ruled that Rishi Sunak’s plan to fly asylum seekers to Rwanda was unlawful and during its deliberations it gave “greatest weight” to submissions by the United Nations’ Refugee Agency (UNHCR).
The UNHCR is mentioned 64 times in the Supreme Court’s 56-page document. It said that migrants sent to Rwanda could be mistreated and sent back to their home countries by the east African state.
It added that Rwanda’s record on human rights was poor and that it had a defective asylum process, evidenced by the fact that it had rejected a “suspiciously high” 100 per cent of applications from Afghanistan, Syria and Yemen between 2020 and 2022.
Besides the Afghan schoolgirls, the UNHCR has facilitated flights of more than 2000 sub saharan Africans to Rwanda. Mr Anderson, responding to the news that the UNHCR had relocated both Afghan schoolchildren and sub saharan migrants to Rwanda, said it was a “fair point” to raise questions around the UN’s double standards.
He quipped “answers on a postcard” when sharing article on X, demanding an urgent response to why Afghan schoolgirls were being sent to Rwanda when it was deemed “too risky” for migrants from the UK.
Express.co.uk has contacted the United Nations for comment.
