Court rules UK owes Rwanda nothing after asylum deal collapse

Britain has escaped a hefty bill from the wreckage of its Rwanda asylum plan. A tribunal at the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague has ruled that the United Kingdom does not owe Rwanda the more than £100 million Kigali claimed, along with about £6 million in compensation and interest, after the deal was abandoned.

The ruling closes one financial chapter of a policy that became one of the Conservatives’ most contested migration experiments. First announced in April 2022 as the Migration and Economic Development Partnership, the arrangement was later turned into a formal treaty signed on 5 December 2023. It was designed to deter small-boat crossings by sending some asylum seekers to Rwanda, but the plan never reached the point of removals: no asylum seeker was ever flown there under the scheme.

The policy was still being fought in the courts and in Parliament when the UK Supreme Court ruled in 2023 that it was unlawful. Ministers then pushed through the Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Act 2024, aiming to assert that Rwanda was safe in law, but the political direction had already shifted. After Labour came to power, the UK Home Office discontinued the removal policy in July 2024, and Keir Starmer described it as “dead and buried.”

Rwanda responded by turning to arbitration. It served a notice of arbitration on the United Kingdom on 24 November 2025, arguing Britain should still have made the scheduled payments under the treaty despite the cancellation. The tribunal held a public hearing from 18 to 20 March 2026 and concluded the hearing on 27 March 2026. In that case, Rwanda said it had spent money preparing to implement the partnership, including work on an asylum appeals chamber, administrative structures and reception facilities.

The decision removes the risk of a direct payment from the UK Treasury, but it does not erase the broader damage the policy left behind. The Rwanda plan consumed years of political capital, prompted repeated legal defeat and became a symbol of the Conservatives’ tougher stance on irregular migration under Boris Johnson and James Cleverly. For future governments, the ruling is likely to sharpen rather than soften the question of whether asylum processing can be outsourced abroad at all, and under what legal conditions a deterrence policy can survive challenge.