By Enyichukwu Enemanna
Rwanda on Wednesday told a panel of international arbitrators that Britain still owes it 100 million pounds ($134 million) under a now contentious refugee transfer deal, which the Prime Minister, Keir Starmer suspended in 2024 when he came to office.
The deal reached in 2022 under the former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, involves sending migrants who arrive in the U.K. as stowaways or in small boats to the East African country.
It included arrangements for payments to Rwanda to help cover costs.
At that time, Rwanda set up an asylum appeals chamber, created ministerial and administrative structures and “prepared reception facilities for the incoming refugees and incurred significant costs in doing so,” Rwanda’s Justice Minister and Attorney General Emmanuel Ugirashebuja told a hearing at the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague.
Upon assumption of office, Starmer, “the new Prime Minister declared the Rwanda scheme to be dead and buried on his first full day in office,” Ugirashebuja said.
“The United Kingdom did not do Rwanda the courtesy of informing it in advance. Instead, Rwanda was left to read about these developments in the media,” he said.
The British government is urging the court to dismiss Rwanda’s claims, arguing that the countries agreed in November 2024 that Rwanda would forgo the payments.
But Rwanda has denied that. Ugirashebuja told the panel that the U.K. “sought to walk away from its legal obligations.”
Starmer’s home secretary at the time the deal was scrapped, Yvette Cooper, called it the “most shocking waste of taxpayer money I have ever seen.”
She estimated that the plan, which ran into legal challenges and was widely criticized by human rights groups, cost 700 million pounds in public funds including making payments to Rwanda, hiring flights that never took off and paying more than a thousand civil servants who worked on the arrangements.
Under the 2022 deal, 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 that the policy was unlawful because Rwanda is not a safe third country for migrants sent there.
