It was obvious refugees could not be deported to Rwanda and that dangerous refugee criminals are eminently deportable but not an elected MEP

Refugee decisions from the top courts in Britain and the EU were handed down thick and fast last week, each landmark in its way and each concerned with the predicament of fugitives in foreign lands in fear of returning home, real or imagined, rational or irrational, genuine or bogus.

There are refugees everywhere: in Europe, Africa, Asia, Australasia and the Americas. On one hand they are entitled to international human rights protection and on the other they are unwelcome by many of the indigenous people where they seek refuge.

So what are governments to do? The answer is in the preamble to the European Convention on Human Rights affirming the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of the UN General Assembly in 1948: effective political democracy buttressed by observance of fundamental human rights. You can’t have the one without the other and where democracy clashes with absolute rights – the right not to be subjected to torture and inhuman a degrading treatment for example – absolute rights prevail. Easier said than done if you are a politician but relatively simple if you are a judge and only concerned with finding the facts, applying the law and doing justice.

Which is exactly what the English Court of Appeal did a week ago last Friday when it held that the European judge who stopped the removal of refugees from Britain to Rwanda last summer was absolutely right in his preliminary assessment that Rwanda was not a safe country. Despite the opprobrium the judge and European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) received in the anti European British press, it turns out that two of the finest English judges in the country reached the same conclusion.