Reform UK outlines five-year plan to detain and deport migrants

Nigel Farage on Tuesday unveiled a sweeping five year plan to detain and deport people who enter the United Kingdom illegally, saying his party would repeal domestic human rights law, withdraw from key international treaties and build large detention centres on surplus military sites to remove hundreds of thousands of migrants. Speaking at a launch event in Oxfordshire, the Reform UK leader said the measures were necessary to stop small boat crossings and to avert what he described as a threat to public order.

Operation Restoring Justice, the eight page programme published by Reform UK, would revoke the Human Rights Act, withdraw the UK from the European Convention on Human Rights and seek to disapply treaties such as the UN Refugee Convention and the Convention Against Torture, the party said. It proposes an Illegal Migration Mass Deportation Bill to bar people who arrive by unauthorised routes from claiming asylum, create a new Deportation Command, and require the Home Secretary to pursue mass removals. Reform said it would scale detention capacity to 24,000, operate up to five charter flights a day and aim to deport as many as 600,000 people in a single parliament. The party...