The Hague, Netherlands — Rwanda told a panel of international stakeholders on Wednesday that Britain is still owed 100 million pounds ($115 million) under a controversial refugee resettlement deal that Prime Minister Keir Stormer scrapped as soon as she took office in 2024.
The 2022 deal brokered by Stormer’s predecessor, Rishi Sunak, included migrants arriving in the UK being sent as stowaways, or on boats, to the East African country. This included a system of payments to Rwanda to help cover costs.
Rwanda established an asylum appeals chamber, created ministerial and administrative structures and “prepared reception facilities for incoming refugees and incurred significant costs in doing so,” Rwanda’s justice minister and attorney general Emmanuel Ugirashebuza told hearings at the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague.
But when Stormer took office, “the new prime minister declared the Rwanda project dead and buried it in his first full day in office,” Ugirashebuza said. “The United Kingdom did not do Rwanda the courtesy of informing them in advance. Instead, Rwanda was left to read about these developments in the media.”
The British government is urging the court to dismiss Rwanda’s claims, arguing that both countries have agreed that Rwanda will cease payments by November 2024.
Rwanda denies it. Ugirashebuza told the committee that the UK “wanted to walk away from its legal obligations”.
“A lot of arbitration is going to turn on evidence of that agreement,” Joelle Grogan, visiting senior research fellow at UCD Sutherland School of Law in Dublin, told The Associated Press in an interview.
The arbitral tribunal at the ornate Peace Palace in The Hague is likely to take months or more to reach a decision after hearings this week.
Sunak originally planned to send some migrants on a one-way trip to Rwanda. Yvette Cooper, Stormer’s home secretary at the time the deal was scrapped, called it “the most shocking waste of taxpayers’ money I have ever seen”.
The project, which has been subject to legal challenges and has been widely criticized by human rights groups, has cost Rwanda 700 million pounds ($904 million) in public funds, including payments to Rwanda, chartering flights and paying more than a thousand civil servants who worked on the project.
Under the 2022 agreement, the migrants were to be sent to Rwanda, where their asylum claims would be processed and, if successful, they would stay. Britain’s Supreme Court ruled the policy illegal because Rwanda was not a safe third country for migrants sent there.
Rwanda launched arbitration proceedings in January, saying the deal had been torpedoed by Stormer “without prior notice to Rwanda”.
During the mediation process, Rwanda accused the UK of breaching the part of the agreement that London had agreed to resettle vulnerable refugees from Rwanda.
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Associated Press writer Jill Lawless in London contributed to this report.
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