Rishi Sunak has announced he will free up 25 courtrooms and 150 judges to help process Rwanda cases and get planes off the ground by July.
The prime minister said the scheme is “one of the most complex operational endeavours” the Home Office has carried out, and requires significant resources to achieve.
“To detain people while we prepare to remove them, we’ve increased detention spaces to 2,200. To quickly process claims, we’ve got 200 trained, dedicated caseworkers ready and waiting”, he said.
“To deal with any legal cases quickly and decisively, the judiciary have made available 25 courtrooms and identified 150 judges who could provide over 5,000 sitting days.”
The comments have provoked outrage on social media, with people being quick to point out that alleged victims of rape have been forced to wait years for their case to be heard.
In March, it was found that more than 180 alleged rape victims in England and Wales have faced more than two years of delays since their case first went to court on what Lord Justice Edis described as a “significant injustice”.
He said that they had been delayed by a series of “shocks”, initially affected in 2021 by the Covid pandemic and then the following year by the criminal barristers’ strike as he warned there was still a shortage of barristers.
Referring to the 181 cases, which he said represented approximately 6 per cent of the total rape caseload and included adult and child alleged victims, Edis said: “This is an unacceptable state of affairs from the point of view of the complainants, the witnesses, the defendants and justice generally.”
He acknowledged that suitably qualified barristers in rape cases were already “in particularly short supply”, adding: “Our system requires a substantial supply of skilled and experienced advocates in all our offence categories, but nowhere more than in rape and other serious sexual offences.
“If that supply is threatened, for whatever reason, our capacity to deal with the work is inhibited and that is a significant limiting factor. We hope that there will be work done on investment made in the long term in order to sustain that necessary supply of skilled people working in the system.”
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