Rwanda seeks $134 million from the UK in arbitration over scrapped refugee deal

THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) — Rwanda told a panel of international arbitrators Wednesday that Britain still owes it 100 million pounds ($134 million) under a contentious refugee resettlement deal that Prime Minister Keir Starmer scrapped immediately after taking office in 2024.

The 2022 deal struck by Starmer’s predecessor, Rishi Sunak, involved sending migrants who arrive in the U.K. as stowaways or in boats to the East African country. It included arrangements for payments to Rwanda to help cover costs.

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.

But when Starmer took office, “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.”

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.

Rwanda denies that. Ugirashebuja told the panel that the U.K. “sought to walk away from its legal obligations.”

“A lot of the arbitration is going to turn around on the proof of that agreement,” Joelle Grogan, visiting senior research fellow at UCD Sutherland School of Law in Dublin, told The Associated Press.

The arbitration court is likely to take months or more to reach a decision after hearings this week.

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, chartering 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.

Rwanda launched the arbitration proceedings in January, also alleging that the U.K. violated part of the deal in which 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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This version corrects the dollar conversion in the first paragraph and summary.