Peers pass four amendments inserting safeguards into bill, including exempting migrants who helped British troops

Good morning. It is now more than five months since Rishi Sunak promised “emergency” legislation to address the supreme court judgment saying the government’s Rwanda deportation policy was unlawful. It has not proceeded at the pace of normal emergency legislation, but the safety of Rwanda (asylum and immigration) bill is now expected to clear parliament within the next 24/36 hours, and it should become law by the end of the week. (It does not became law until the king grants royal assent, and it can take a few hours to get Charles to sign the relevant bit of paper.)

But before parliamentary officials can send the bill to the Palace, the Commons and the Lords have to agree, and there are still four outstanding issues unresolved. Last night peers passed four amendments inserting safeguards into the bill. They would:

The problem is, we have no evidence that Rwanda is safe. All the evidence that is put before us demonstrates that at the moment it is not. The supreme court said in November it wasn’t safe. We signed a treaty with Rwanda which was supposed to remedy the defects, and this Act will come into force when the treaty comes into force. But even the treaty itself accepts that signing the treaty doesn’t make Rwanda safe.

All this amendment would say is that, instead of us in parliament in London being expected to assert in legislation that Rwanda is safe, when the evidence is including, from the government itself last night, that it isn’t currently safe, it’s a work in progress – instead of having to sign up to that untruth, the government would invite the monitoring committee to certify that Rwanda is safe and when it is safe, the flights can begin.

And should by any chance Rwanda ever cease to be a safe country, well the monitoring committee should say that as well.

Two endurance sailors’ perilous voyage is supposed to lead them to empathy for refugees’ plight – but they sure take their time discovering that

Here is a well-intentioned but brief, unsatisfying and oddly structured documentary, supposedly about refugees and boat people … although the refugees’ experiences are only discussed in the final 10 minutes or so. The film is actually about two Egyptians, Omar Nour and Omar Samra, energetic and prosperous young entrepreneurs who in 2017, in a spirit of adventure, took on the Talisker Whisky Atlantic Challenge, a well-established annual endurance event with a good safety record in which participants journey in a rowing boat across the Atlantic from La Gomera in the Canaries to Antigua; it is a 3,000-nautical-mile, 40-day ordeal in treacherous seas.

After just nine days, these two guys got into terrible difficulties, perhaps as a result of their relative inexperience. Their craft capsized and they had to be dragged out of the water by a Greek cargo ship, a chaotic rescue that itself could have gone fatally wrong. It all sounds very tense, although as the two men are here being interviewed after the event, we know that they survived. So what was the point of this fiasco? Did they put their families and friends through an agony of worry, just for a macho ego trip? Well, around an hour in to this 70-minute film they tell us that they now appreciate the sufferings of boat people and refugees – some of whose testimonies are duly tacked on to the end of the film.

Rishi Sunak braced for fresh round of wrangling over plan that is due to cost taxpayers £1.8m per deportee

• UK politics – latest updates

The number of people travelling by small boat to seek asylum in the UK hit a new daily high for 2024 at the weekend, figures show, as Rishi Sunak braces for a fresh round of parliamentary wrangling over the Rwanda deportation bill.

Unions and charities are preparing to mount legal challenges if the bill, which is meant to stop the boats, passes into law this week.

As the war in Sudan moves into its second year , 1,000 refugees a day continue to cross its southern border. Within the small town of Renk in South Sudan, a rapidly growing refugee population faces desperate shortages of water, food and shelter. For many, South Sudan marks a return to a land they thought they had left behind, having fled the country after civil war broke out in 2013. Now new fighting in their adopted country has forced them back again

• UK Foreign Office holding secret talks with Sudan’s RSF paramilitary group

Exclusive: Rights groups denounce negotiations with Rapid Support Forces, accused of ethnic cleansing and war crimes

• Inside South Sudan’s worsening refugee crisis – in pictures

Foreign Office officials are holding secret talks with the paramilitary group that has been waging a campaign of ethnic cleansing in Sudan for the past year.

News that the British government and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) are engaged in clandestine negotiations has prompted warnings that such talks risk legitimising the notorious militia – which continues to commit multiple war crimes – while undermining Britain’s moral credibility in the region.

For Ukraine’s entry in this year’s Venice Biennale, two artists asked refugees to help them create an ‘acceptable’ portrait of a woman ravaged by war. We meet the team behind an astonishing project

In a room inside a Liverpool gallery, Saskia Pay, a young British actor dressed in studiedly ordinary jeans and top, is sitting on a chair in front of a camera. The guy with the camera, Ukrainian artist Andrii Dostliev, briefs a trio of other women, all of them refugees from Ukraine, on the type of image he is trying to create. He indicates the props they can use – a foil blanket, an arm sling, a dirty teddy bear, some makeup. The women nod. They don’t need much in the way of explanation. Everyone knows this kind of picture.

Unhesitatingly they move in, wrapping the foil blanket around Pay’s shoulders. “It would be more natural if she had marks on her face,” one of them points out, and another gets to work with the makeup. Next, hair. One of the women says that when she was living under occupation – in the town of Makariv, west of Kyiv, near Bucha, which fell under Russian control at the start of the full-scale invasion – she just pulled hers into a ponytail and it went unwashed for days on end. Another observes that it would be better if the model had some blood on her face. They give her the teddy bear to clutch to her body; they give her the arm sling.

Families of those who helped British forces could be deported from Pakistan despite promise to resettle them in UK

Afghan families who helped UK forces and then fled to neighbouring Pakistan are in danger of being deported back to the Taliban due to Home Office delays in bringing them to the UK.

In the chaotic evacuation period in the Afghan capital, Kabul, in August 2021 some family members eligible for resettlement in the UK became separated from the rest of their families. Some boarded flights while others were unable to due to crushes at the airport and instead fled over the border to Pakistan.

Alexander Demidenko, who guided refugees back to their homeland, was arrested and tortured by Kremlin forces. One of the many he helped recalls his courage and kindness

Lost and disoriented, Olena Primak stood at Belgorod’s train station, holding tightly to her young daughter’s arm. The scorching summer heat and the long journey had left the Ukrainian refugee on the brink of collapse. Primak had been told to wait for a Russian volunteer called “Alexander” who would help her get back to Ukraine .

“Suddenly, a man with the most generous of smiles appeared at the station,” she recalled. With a gentle countenance, warm eyes and grey hair, the 61-year-old Alexander Demidenko approached Primak, offering to take her bags.

Long-awaited package of measures marks victory for Europe’s centre albeit with ‘doubts and concerns’ over implementation

Almost a decade in the making, the EU’s new migration and asylum pact suffered so many setbacks, stalemates and rewrites that when member states finally announced a deal last year, its passage through parliament seemed assured.

That was, however, to ignore the objections of Europe’s resurgent far-right parties, who felt it was not tough enough (and, perhaps, hoped to profit at the ballot box from allowing the current chaos around migration to continue).