An international arbitral court has delivered a landmark ruling that clears the United Kingdom of any obligation to pay Rwanda over £100 million in damages for the cancellation of the controversial offshore asylum processing scheme signed by the former Conservative government. The Permanent Court of Arbitration based in The Hague, Netherlands, rejected Rwanda’s legal claim that the UK breached the terms of the bilateral agreement when newly-elected Prime Minister Keir Starmer scrapped the policy shortly after taking office.
The highly controversial policy was first unveiled in 2022 by then-Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson, with the formal agreement later finalized under his successor Rishi Sunak. Under the terms of the original deal, the UK was set to make multi-million pound payments to Rwanda in exchange for the African country hosting asylum seekers who arrived in the UK via unauthorized small boat crossings across the English Channel. Sunak framed the scheme as a core deterrent to reduce the flow of irregular migration across the Channel, but it faced repeated legal challenges in UK courts and fierce political opposition throughout its development.
Labour made scrapping the Rwanda asylum plan a central campaign pledge during the 2024 UK general election. After securing victory, Starmer moved quickly to cancel the agreement, publicly declaring the policy “dead and buried” within days of his inauguration. During the three-day arbitration hearing held in The Hague, UK legal representatives argued that the cancellation of the scheme following a change in government was entirely predictable and logically consistent. They maintained that it was basic common sense that no additional payments would be required after the policy was terminated, and denied that the UK had violated any terms of the original agreement. The legal team told the court that “Rwanda is not entitled to any of the forms of relief it seeks.”
This ruling brings a swift legal conclusion to one of the first major international policy disputes of the new Starmer administration, and resolves a potential £100 million liability for the UK public purse. This is an ongoing developing news story, with further details expected to be released in the coming hours.