Rwanda’s Justice Minister, Dr Emmanuel Ugirashebuja, opened the country’s case against the United Kingdom at the Permanent Court of Arbitration this week, seeking £100 million in unpaid treaty obligations and an apology. The hearing signals a new era: an African state holding a European power legally accountable for walking away from its commitments.
In a wood-panelled hearing room at the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague on Tuesday, Rwanda’s Minister of Justice and Attorney General, Dr Emmanuel Ugirashebuja, opened his country’s case against the United Kingdom with measured precision. The substance was legal. The subtext was historical. And the significance for Africa’s relationship with Europe runs deeper than the £100 million at stake.
Rwanda has taken the United Kingdom to international arbitration over what Kigali describes as the UK’s deliberate failure to honour the financial terms of a binding treaty, the Migration and Economic Development Partnership (MEDP), signed in 2022 after a change of British government led to the scheme being abandoned without the proper legal formalities. The case, filed in November 2025 and now formally underway, may be the first time a sub-Saharan African state has brought inter-state arbitration proceedings against a major European power before an international tribunal of this standing.
“The United Kingdom’s intransigence on these issues has left Rwanda with no other choice to vindicate its rights, and secure the substantial sums of money of which Rwanda has been deprived.”— Dr Emmanuel Ugirashebuja, Rwanda’s Minister of Justice and Attorney General, opening submission, PCA Case No. 45-2025
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What the Case Is About
The Migration and Economic Development Partnership was announced in April 2022 under then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson as a policy to deter irregular migration across the English Channel. Under its terms, asylum seekers arriving in the UK by small boat would be transferred to Rwanda, which would process and potentially resettle them. In exchange, the UK committed substantial financial transfers to Rwanda under what was called the Economic Transformation and Integration Fund (ETIF), intended to support sustainable economic growth in Rwanda and improve conditions for its existing refugee population.
Rwanda took the partnership seriously. As Ugirashebuja laid out in his opening, Kigali passed new legislation, created an asylum appeals tribunal, established at least 12 ministerial and administrative structures, and built and equipped reception facilities. The scheme was elevated from a memorandum of understanding to a binding treaty, and in June 2024, a binding finance note was signed under which the UK undertook to pay £50 million to Rwanda in April 2025 and a further £50 million in April 2026.
Then came a British general election. In July 2024, newly elected Prime Minister Keir Starmer declared on his first full day in office that the Rwanda scheme was “dead and buried.” Rwanda, Ugirashebuja told the tribunal, was not informed in advance. It read about the decision in the media. The UK then sought to withhold both £50 million payments totalling £100 million, without formally terminating the treaty under its own legal provisions. The treaty only formally ended on March 16, 2026, meaning the UK remained legally bound by it and its financial obligations within it for over 18 months after Starmer’s declaration.
Three Claims: Money, Refugees, and an Apology
Rwanda’s case before the Permanent Court of Arbitration rests on three separate claims. First, it argues the UK breached the MEDP’s financial provisions by refusing to pay the two ETIF instalments already due. Second, it argues the UK breached the treaty process by failing to formally terminate the agreement through its proper mechanisms, instead simply declaring it politically defunct while leaving the legal instrument in force. Third, and perhaps most striking, Rwanda argues the UK failed to honour its commitment under Article 19 of the MEDP to resettle vulnerable refugees from Rwanda into the United Kingdom.
On that third point, Ugirashebuja told the tribunal that Rwanda seeks not only financial compensation but an apology, “a modest sum in compensation, less than 10% of the UNHCR’s budget for Rwanda for one year alone, or an apology for the United Kingdom’s blatant disregard of this obligation.” That framing seeking an apology from a European sovereign state before an international tribunal is itself a statement about how Rwanda is positioning this case, and how it wants the world to read it.
The UK has said it will defend its position. A spokesperson for Prime Minister Starmer stated the government would “robustly defend our position to protect British taxpayers.” London’s legal argument rests in part on the premise that Rwanda, in the November 2024 diplomatic exchanges, effectively consented to forgoing the payments, a premise Kigali categorically rejects. Ugirashebuja told the tribunal that Rwanda made its position clear: it refused to accept the language of “agreement” in the UK’s draft notes and omitted any language from its replies that could indicate consent.
Rwanda’s Case Starts With Its Refugee Record
Ugirashebuja opened his submission not with legal arguments but with Rwanda’s history. He described how many Rwandans have themselves experienced displacement, how that experience has shaped Kigali’s approach to migration, and how Rwanda currently hosts over 130,000 UNHCR-registered refugees and asylum seekers, including people from the DRC, Burundi, Libya, and Afghanistan. He pointed to the 2021 agreement to receive Afghan girls excluded from education by the Taliban, which established the School of Leadership in Kigali, and to the 2023 reception of over 200 Sudanese medical students stranded by civil war.
The framing was deliberate. Rwanda was not presenting itself as a passive recipient of UK policy. It was presenting itself as an active humanitarian partner with a proven track record, a partner that fulfilled its obligations and now deserves the same in return. As recently as last month, Ugirashebuja noted, Rwanda received a further 164 asylum seekers from Libya under its ongoing UNHCR emergency transit arrangement.
What This Case Means for Africa-Europe Relations
The Berlin Conference of 1884–1886 established the legal and diplomatic framework under which European powers carved up Africa without African consent or participation. The implicit assumption embedded in that moment that African states exist as objects of European policy rather than as sovereign actors in international law has never fully disappeared from the architecture of relations between the two continents.
Rwanda’s decision to sue the United Kingdom at The Hague is, among other things, a direct rejection of that assumption. It says: we enter into treaties as equals. We implement our obligations in good faith. And when a European government decides for domestic political reasons, without notice or legal process, to walk away from its commitments, we will not simply accept it. We will take you to court.
That posture resonates well beyond the specifics of the Rwanda-UK migration deal. Across the continent, African states are increasingly asserting legal and diplomatic agency in their dealings with European partners. The era in which a European government could abandon a treaty obligation with an African state, issue a political statement, and expect the matter to simply dissolve that era appears to be ending.
“Whatever assessment that the British Government made of its policy interests, the obligations by which they have chosen to remain bound must be honoured.”— Dr Emmanuel Ugirashebuja, Rwanda’s Justice Minister and Attorney General
What the Tribunal Must Now Decide
The Permanent Court of Arbitration is not a court of public opinion. It will rule on the law. Its task is to determine whether the UK’s November 2024 diplomatic exchanges, in which it requested Rwanda to forgo the payments, constituted a legally valid modification of the treaty’s financial obligations, or whether Rwanda’s refusal to consent left those obligations fully intact.
The legal argument is technical; it turns on the precise language of diplomatic notes, the rules of treaty interpretation under the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, and the specific provisions of the MEDP itself. But the underlying question is simple: can a state walk away from a treaty obligation it no longer finds politically convenient, simply by declaring it dead, while leaving the legal instrument in force? Rwanda says no. The UK says the specific exchanges between the parties mean the answer is more complicated.
The irony is that the Rwanda scheme, one of the most controversial and legally contested British immigration policies of the past decade, never worked. None of the scheduled deportation flights ever departed. Only four people went to Rwanda voluntarily. The UK Supreme Court ruled the scheme unlawful in November 2023 under international law. The new British government inherited both the legal wreckage and the unresolved financial obligations. Now it must answer for both.
Rwanda’s faith in the tribunal, expressed explicitly in Ugirashebuja’s closing remarks, is itself a statement. It says: we trust international legal institutions to provide justice even when the defendant is a permanent member of the UN Security Council. Whether that faith proves justified remains to be seen. What is beyond doubt is that Rwanda walked into that hearing room as an equal under international law and made sure the world knew it.