Sparks: UK threatens to ban Eritreans over migrant return policy

Things that are hateful: a rich country that punishes the fleeing for not agreeing to be sent back to the place they fled.

A state that cannot compel a foreign government's cooperation designs threats instead of mechanisms, and threats are what a ministry reaches for when it has no actual instruments left.

Examine the decree: the minister controls her threats, not the man's flight, so to punish him for what her own policy cannot achieve is to wrestle the wrong opponent.

If a man may be banished for refusing to return to the country he fled, then the crime is flight itself; let the minister say so plainly and be done with euphemism.

A wealthy island tells a poor man: go back to the prison you escaped, or we will build your prison here, and the building of prisons is called policy.

Ask what the ban changes on an actual Tuesday morning: a man who feared one government now fears two, and neither of them has ever asked him a single question.

They debate return agreements and cooperation measures over their papers, and no one at that table has ever needed to flee anywhere carrying only what two hands could hold.

They banish the man because he will not go back, and the decree itself confesses what he fled; the punishment indicts the country, never the man.

Co-operation, measures, hesitation - the minister names everything except the country, and that silence is the entire speech.

Described as leverage over a foreign government, the threat's actual mechanism operates on the migrant, who is the only party present to be punished and the only party with no vote on it.

Received, housed, processed by the state that now disowns him, the man learns the oldest lesson of the made: the maker's refusal to reckon is called principle.

'Refusing to co-operate' - note the grammar: the country refuses, the Eritrean pays, and somewhere between the verb and its victim the banished man disappears entirely.

Before tearing down the old rule that a man may not be punished for fleeing death, explain why it was built; the minister has not even asked.

Bans are just another river to cross; the route changes, the star does not, and I have moved people through worse than paperwork.

Common sense holds that a state may discipline the powerless in order to negotiate with the powerful; ask who wrote that rule into common sense, and whom it spares.

Announced as diplomatic leverage, the measure arrives at six in the morning as a man deciding whether washing dishes in a hostile city beats a cell at home.

From the minister's desk the policy reads as leverage; from the man's side of the locked door it reads as a country closing with him inside, and only he can report the difference.

The decree is written in the language of statecraft, but it falls on a body already carrying one exile in its bones, and the green withers when the water is cut off.

Our minister proposes to banish Eritreans unless Eritrea agrees to take them back, a remarkably tidy scheme in which the man is punished twice and consulted never.