UNHCR stance on UK-Rwanda deal smells of racism, double standards

For so long, the United Nations refugee agency, or UNHCR, has been Rwanda’s key partner in relocating asylum seekers from different countries.

But the UN agency now claims that Rwanda is not a safe country for asylum seekers as regards the UK-Rwanda deal. During a court hearing on September 6, at the Royal Courts of Justice, in London, the UNHCR shamelessly joined dishonest opponents of the deal, and questioned Rwanda’s capacity to offer safety to migrants.

Under a September 2019 agreement, UNHCR, the Government of Rwanda and the African Union (AU), have evacuated more than 1,000 migrants from Libya to Rwanda – including the group, the eleventh, that arrived in Kigali on August 31. The UN agency spent millions of dollars to support the initiative.

Visiting Rwanda in 2021, Filippo Grandi, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, said: “I really want to particularly thank the Government of Rwanda. It was President Kagame’s initiative to launch the ETM (Emergency Transit Mechanism) in Rwanda a few years ago, and of course we will continue to need this mechanism as long as the situation in Libya continues to be as difficult as it is now.”

The UN agency knows well Rwanda’s ability of offering safety and opportunities to refugees since the country’s rebirth, after the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi. Owing to the lesson learnt by many Rwandans who lived in exile for decades, the Rwandan government welcomes refugees and provides security for them.

During the 2022 World Refugee Day, in June, the UNHCR Representative in Rwanda, Ahmed Baba Fall, said: “UNHCR remains grateful to the government of Rwanda and the host community for welcoming and hosting the forcibly displaced including refugees.”

Surprisingly the UNHCR, which praised Rwanda’s open-door policy on refugees as ideal, opposed the UK-Rwanda deal during the court hearing in London. It accused Rwanda of discriminating against migrants from Middle East countries especially from Afghanistan, Yemen and Syria, riding on the few specific cases of alleged ‘refoulement’.

Within the written submissions read in court, the UNHCR stated that there are some cases where Rwanda rejected the claims of asylum seekers and sent them to other countries. Yet Rwanda found that the Yemeni and Syrian who were claiming for asylum had sufficient means of living in a country as foreigners rather than refugees, and they are currently working and raising their families in Rwanda.

Condemning Rwanda for rejecting asylum seekers is turning a blind eye to the reality. Following the fall of the country to the Taliban in 2021, girls were banned from attending school, and Rwanda welcomed Afghan girls who were studying in the School of Leadership Afghanistan (SOLA) to safely continue their studies. To date, SOLA is working in Rwanda safely and receives applications of Afghan girls from all over the world.

In its malicious accusations, the UNHCR stated that Rwanda lacks “irreducible minimum components of an accessible, reliable, fair and efficient asylum system”. But as demand rises, so will the capacity. For the UK-Rwanda deal, the former agreed to provide Kigali up to £120 million which will be used to help migrants integrate into Rwandan community.

Rwanda is home to more than 130,000 refugees from different countries.

They are safe and secure, and are witnesses of how they are treated with dignity and respect. Refugees as well as migrants are assisted in various aspects of life whether economically or socially.