In an exclusive interview with the Guardian, Yasmine Ahmed, who has been the UK director of HRW since November 2020, said the government indicating it could “disapply” the Human Rights Act to an emergency bill that will allow it to send asylum seekers to Rwanda – despite the supreme court ruling the policy illegal – is part of an escalating attack on human rights.

She continued: “Rishi Sunak’s government must know that even scrapping the Human Rights Act will not prevent it from facing significant legal barriers to its Rwanda policy, but what we’re seeing is the UK moving towards a place where the government feels it can undermine the integrity of the judiciary, undermine or scrap human rights laws that don’t serve its current political agenda, and create new laws that do.

“Not only is the government talking about ripping up domestic human rights law and ignoring its international obligations, it has launched an open attack on the right to peacefully demonstrate, is locking up climate protesters, criminalising refugees and has given the police unprecedented powers over citizens,” Ahmed said.

“This approach not only discredits and undermines our ability to hold other human rights violators to account on the international stage, but it creates a model of governance that puts political ideology over a state’s legal obligation to uphold basic human rights that were put into law to protect us all.

She says that in recent weeks, attempts to stop pro-Palestinian protests by the then home secretary, Suella Braverman, and the government’s attacks on the supreme court’s ruling that its Rwanda asylum policy is illegal shows how emboldened the state has become in showing contempt for human rights.

“They have been successful in making us believe that ripping up human rights laws and putting new ones in place will only affect vulnerable and controversial groups,” she said.

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