Gashora lies beyond Kigali’s hills, past the last dense seams of the capital, where the road opens into the wide, sunlit plains of Bugesera. Here, asylum is not a political slogan but an everyday process: registration, shelter, waiting. For years, the UN refugee agency’s Emergency Transit Mechanism (ETM) centre in Gashora has served as a temporary landing place for refugees evacuated from danger zones, holding them in limbo as their cases are assessed and resettlement options explored.
It is roughly an hour’s drive from Kigali, close enough to the country’s administrative heart, far enough to feel like a space set aside for those between destinations.
Yet when Britain negotiated its controversial asylum partnership with Rwanda, the accommodation that came to symbolise the scheme was not in Gashora. It was in Kigali, in the leafy neighbourhood of Kagugu: Hope Guest House, refurbished and prepared as a reception point for asylum seekers who would be flown in from the United Kingdom.
Hope Guest House carries a longer and more complex history. Long before it entered global headlines as part of Europe’s migration deterrence strategy, it was associated with Rwanda’s post-genocide rebuilding, linked to efforts to support young survivors whose lives had been shattered by the events of 1994, and later held up as part of the country’s attempt to rebuild futures from trauma.
That history is what makes its repurposing so symbolically charged. A site once tied to survivor support was reintroduced to the world as a transit space for asylum seekers redirected from Europe and has now found itself at the centre of a £100 million arbitration dispute, after Britain walked away from scheduled payments under the deal.
The deal and the money behind it
The financial architecture that underpinned Hope Guest House’s transformation was substantial and deliberately so. The Rwanda-UK asylum partnership was not framed as a short-term hosting arrangement but as a multi-year commitment, supported by payments intended to cover accommodation, healthcare, education, security and long-term integration.
By the time the scheme was abandoned, Britain had already spent more than £700 million preparing and sustaining it. According to UK government accounting published in late 2024, approximately £290 million of that total had been transferred directly to Rwanda, including £270 million paid into Rwanda’s Economic Transformation and Integration Fund, alongside an advance payment to support operational readiness.
The agreement was designed to scale. For each person relocated, the UK committed to a five-year support package costing up to £150,000 per individual, covering housing, food, healthcare, education and administrative processing. A further £20,000 per person was to be paid into Rwanda’s development fund. These were not ad-hoc transfers but figures embedded in the policy’s design.
Two additional payments, £50 million due in April 2025 and another £50 million in April 2026, were written into the partnership’s financial schedule. It is these instalments that Rwanda now says remain outstanding, and which form the basis of the arbitration proceedings launched at the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague.
In practice, the scale envisaged on paper never materialised. Legal challenges in the UK kept flights grounded, and only four people were ultimately relocated to Rwanda, all on a voluntary basis. Hope Guest House remained largely unused, maintained and staffed for arrivals that did not come.
When the courts intervened
The numbers alone, however, do not explain why the scheme stalled. The decisive constraint came not from Kigali, but from London’s courts.
In November 2023, the UK Supreme Court delivered a unanimous judgment that would reshape the fate of the partnership. The court ruled that, under the legal framework then in place, the UK could not lawfully remove asylum seekers to Rwanda because there were substantial grounds to believe they could face a real risk of being returned to countries where they would be persecuted, a breach of the principle of non-refoulement, which sits at the core of international refugee law.
The judgment did not accuse Rwanda of bad faith. Nor did it suggest that the country was incapable of hosting refugees. Instead, it focused on whether Rwanda’s asylum system, as it then operated, provided sufficient safeguards to guarantee that claims would be assessed fairly and that wrongful returns would not occur. On the evidence before it, including material from the UN refugee agency, the court concluded those safeguards were not yet robust enough.
For the UK government of the day, the ruling was a legal roadblock rather than a final verdict. Ministers moved quickly to renegotiate the treaty, introducing stronger guarantees and oversight mechanisms, and asked Parliament to legislate to assert Rwanda’s safety as a matter of domestic law. The revised agreement was signed in December 2023, followed by the passage of the now repealed Safety of Rwanda Act in early 2024.
Rwanda for its part, enacted the Law n° 042/2024 of 19/04/2024 to govern refugees and asylum seekers in Rwanda, and to establish a comprehensive legal framework for their management, status determination, rights, and obligations. The law aimed to align with international standards, outline procedures for refugee status, appeal mechanisms, and revocation.
But the legal reset came too late. Before the reworked framework could be tested in practice, Britain’s political landscape shifted.
A policy abandoned, obligations disputed
A new UK government took office in July 2024 and moved swiftly to abandon the policy altogether, declaring it unworkable, legally fraught and fiscally indefensible. Flights were cancelled, and ministers made clear that no further asylum seekers would be sent to Rwanda.
What the Supreme Court judgment had done, in effect, was to expose the fragility of a policy that depended not only on diplomatic agreement but on sustained legal and political alignment inside the UK. Once that alignment fractured, the financial commitments underpinning the scheme were the next to be questioned.
For Kigali, the UK’s retreat did not merely end a policy experiment. It raised a more fundamental question about the durability of state commitments once domestic politics intervened.
Rwanda did not contest Britain’s right to change course. Nor did it insist that asylum seekers continue to be sent against London’s will. What it did challenge was the assumption that the financial obligations embedded in the partnership could simply be set aside without negotiation.
Why Rwanda went to arbitration
The treaty itself anticipated disagreement. It set out a structured process for resolving disputes: consultation between officials, escalation to political dialogue, and, if those avenues failed, arbitration under the rules of the Permanent Court of Arbitration.
In November 2024, the UK informed Kigali that it would not make the two remaining payments scheduled under the agreement, citing the scheme’s cancellation. Rwanda responded that it was prepared to discuss revised financial terms if the treaty was formally terminated. Those discussions, Rwandan officials say, never took place.
Instead, Britain’s position hardened. It made clear it had no intention of paying the outstanding sums, and no intention of honouring a parallel commitment to resettle a portion of Rwanda’s most vulnerable refugees in the UK.
On 24 November 2025, Rwanda filed a Notice of Arbitration at the Permanent Court of Arbitration, formally initiating inter-state proceedings against the United Kingdom. The claim advances three arguments: that the UK breached agreed financial arrangements set out in diplomatic notes; that it violated the treaty’s financial provisions; and that it failed to meet its resettlement commitments.
For Britain, the arbitration presents a financial and legal risk. For Rwanda, it represents a test of whether treaties entered into with powerful partners remain enforceable once political priorities shift.
Why this matters to Africa
Beyond the legal arguments and the £100 million at stake, the dispute is being watched closely across the continent.
African governments have increasingly entered complex agreements with wealthier partners on migration control, security cooperation and development finance. Many of these arrangements are politically sensitive in the countries that fund them, shaped by electoral pressures far removed from the African capitals expected to implement them.
The Rwanda-UK partnership exposes the risks inherent in such deals. Infrastructure is prepared, systems are adapted, reputations are staked, and opportunity costs are absorbed long before a single programme reaches scale.
For African states, the question is not whether partners will change their minds, but whether the legal commitments underpinning such partnerships remain enforceable when they do.
If Rwanda succeeds, it would reinforce the principle that treaties are not optional instruments and that financial obligations do not dissolve with political inconvenience. If it fails, the message may be more sobering.
Back at Hope Guest House
For now, Hope Guest House in Kagugu remains largely quiet.
The rooms prepared for arrivals from Britain stand as they did months ago, orderly, maintained, unused. In Gashora, the ETM centre continues its work much as it always has, receiving refugees from elsewhere, processing cases, facilitating onward movement when possible.
The tribunal’s ruling, whenever it comes, will not be delivered in Kigali or London, but in The Hague. Yet its implications will be felt in capitals across Africa, wherever governments weigh the promises of powerful partners against the long memory of abandoned commitments.
For Rwanda, the argument remains simple. The guests never came. The policy ended. But the agreement, Kigali argues, was not meant to vanish with them.
