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The Hague, Netherlands — <\/span>Rwanda told a panel of international arbitrators on Wednesday that Britain still owed it 100 million pounds ($115 million) in a controversial case. refugee resettlement agreement<\/a> Which Prime Minister Keir Starmer ended soon after taking office in 2024.<\/p>\n The 2022 deal struck by Starmer’s predecessor Rishi Sunak included sending migrants coming to Britain as stowaways or on boats to the East African country. This included arranging for payments to Rwanda to help cover the costs.<\/p>\n Rwanda established an asylum appeals chamber, created ministerial and administrative structures and “prepared reception facilities for incoming refugees and incurred significant costs in doing so,” Emmanuel Ugirshebuza, Rwanda’s justice minister and attorney general, said at a hearing at the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague.<\/p>\n But when Starmer took office, “the new prime minister declared the Rwanda Plan dead and buried on his first full day in office,” Ugirshebuza said. “The United Kingdom did not afford Rwanda the courtesy of informing Rwanda in advance. Instead, Rwandans were left to read about these events in the media.”<\/p>\n The British government is urging the court to dismiss Rwanda’s claims, arguing that the two countries had agreed in November 2024 that Rwanda would forego payments.<\/p>\n Rwanda denies this. Ugirshebuza told the panel that the UK “wants to walk away from its legal obligations.”<\/p>\n “A lot of arbitration is going to change on the evidence of that agreement,” Joel Grogan, visiting senior research fellow at UCD Sutherland School of Law in Dublin, told The Associated Press in an interview.<\/p>\n The arbitration court based in The Hague’s Peace Palace is likely to take months or longer to reach a decision after this week’s hearing.<\/p>\n The plan was originally set up by Sunak to deport some migrants one way trip to rwanda<\/a>. At the time the deal was cancelled, Starmer’s Home Secretary Yvette Cooper called it “the most shocking waste of taxpayers’ money ever seen”.<\/p>\n He estimated that the plan, which faced legal challenges and was widely criticized by human rights groups, cost 700 million pounds ($904 million) in public funds, including payments to Rwanda, chartered flights that never took off and payments to more than a thousand civil servants who worked on the plan.<\/p>\n Under the 2022 agreement, migrants were to be sent to Rwanda, where their asylum claims would be processed and, if successful, they would live. of britain Supreme Court<\/a> Ruling that the policy was illegal because Rwanda is not a safe third country for migrants sent there.<\/p>\n