Migrants and the Rwanda deal

The Republic of Rwanda is a landlocked country in the Great Rift Valley of East Africa with an economy based on subsistence agriculture. This country of a thousand lush hills, famous for its golden monkeys, elephants, zebras, giraffes, and for its Mountain Gorillas, one of the world’s last habitats for the endangered gorilla, is also a major player on the world’s tantalum extraction and produces tin, tungsten, and gold.

Rwanda has the only active tin smelting plant in Africa. But the United Kingdom, UK, since 2022 has been trying to make the country the last hope for its asylum seekers to reside.

In April 2022 the UK Conservative government under Prime Minister Rishi Sunak signed an agreement with Rwanda to deport people seeking asylum in Britain to Rwanda. The agreement is known as the UK and Rwanda Migration and Economic Development Partnership.

It was an inhumane immigration policy proposed by the Conservative governments of Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, and then Sunak, whereby people whom the United Kingdom identified as illegal immigrants or asylum seekers would have been relocated to Rwanda for processing, asylum and resettlement.

Those who were successful in claiming asylum would have remained in Rwanda, and they would not have been permitted to return to the UK. The UK would invest in a development fund for Rwanda and financially support migrant’s relocation and accommodation costs to move to Rwanda.

The total cost of the scheme is estimated to be 700 million pounds sterling. About 20 million pounds was reportedly paid to the Government of Rwanda for processing costs, on top of 120 million pounds of development funding already paid.

This was to deter the business model of people smuggling and small boat crossings through the English channel by increasing numbers of people reaching the UK without authorization. The plan received legal clearance from the British High court, but an interim measure by the European Court of Human Rights led to the plan being halted until the conclusion of the legal action in the UK. At the end of 2022, the High court further ruled that though the plan was lawful, the individual cases of eight asylum seekers due to be deported that year had to be reconsidered.

The Court of Appeal ruled on 29 June 2023 that the plan was unlawful , and the Supreme court of the UK subsequently declared the policy unlawful because Rwanda was not a safe country to which asylum seekers can be removed. In response to the Supreme court judgement, the Conservative government of Sunak published a new treaty with Rwanda and introduced a new legislation which declares that Rwanda is a safe country for asylum seekers.

On 25 April 2024, the UK’s treaty with Rwanda was ratified, and the Safety of Rwanda [Asylum and immigration] Act 2024 became law. But since winning the 2024 general election in July and forming the new government, the Labour Party cancelled the Rwanda scheme. The new Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, branded the Rwanda deal as ‘dead and buried.’

Though the deal has officially being cancelled, the British government by having such a deal showcased to other European countries on how the old world could solve their internal migration crisis at the expense of Africans.

The European Union, EU, agreed in December last year on new rules to handle irregular arrivals of asylum seekers and migrants, a deal hailed as a breakthrough after almost a decade of bitter feud on the issue.

Now Germany, under pressure to act after a recent Islamic state-linked terror attack at a city festival, wants to restrict and send EU migrants to Rwanda to use the 50-double rooms facility still empty after Starmer pulled UK out of the Rwanda deal.

In this context, observers say African states, in particular the former colonies, need to keep up the pressure on such inhumane policy pursued by the UK and European countries in general, by putting forward territorial and material claims to them, which otherwise would mean their tacit consent to this s policy directed at them.

It has been speculated the new Labour Government could try to recoup some of the millions of pounds of taxpayers’ cash already given to Kigali to create facilities like the Hope Hostel for asylum seekers through the exploitation of the country’s raw materials. But the Rwanda government has now played down the prospect of a refund, as there was ‘’no obligation’’ to refund to the UK, despite no migrants ever being deported from the UK to Africa under the scheme.

Abubakar Idris,
Ibadan, Oyo state