Regular readers of this column will recall the now scrapped and always controversial 2022 scheme under which the UK proposed to dispatch would-be asylum seekers arriving in small boats from France across the English Channel to far-off Rwanda.

The arrangement was cobbled together when Boris Johnson was UK Prime Minister. This was his answer to what had become a serious illegal immigration problem, exemplified in recent years by 37 000 Channel crossings in 2024 and more than 40 000 in 2025 – the highest number since 2022, when nearly  46 000 made the journey.

Keir Starmer had little patience for the scheme, terminating it soon after taking office as Prime Minister in July 2024.

Before this move, the scheme had faced a string of legal challenges, culminating in a November 2023 ruling by the UK Supreme Court that it was illegal under international law. That confirmed what critics had said all along: you cannot outsource asylum obligations to a country such as Rwanda, which has a contested human rights record, and expect the law to politely look away.

The agreement’s abandonment came after the UK taxpayer had paid a whopping £240-million to Rwanda from 2022 to 2024 to support the latter’s asylum system and integration capacity, and to fund housing, healthcare, processing infrastructure and settlement support for relocated migrants. Part of this amount was a guaranteed incentive for Rwanda’s participation – effectively, a retainer rather than payment by results.

Now, for all that expense, only four volunteers made the trip to Rwanda. A further invoice for the folly of Johnson and the Conservative Party might still need to be settled. Aggrieved by the cancellation, Rwanda has approached the Hague-based Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA), seeking £50-million in compensation.

This amount was contractually due in April 2025. The basis for the claim is that, while Starmer declared the agreement “dead and buried”, he did not immediately complete all the formal treaty-termination steps required under it and international law.

Rwanda also argues that it incurred substantial sunk costs – to build and maintain infrastructure, to reserve housing and services, and to allocate administrative and legal resources. All this, it says, relied on UK funding, including the unpaid £50-million instalment.

The agreement – officially the Migration and Economic Development Partnership – explicitly provides for arbitration, which is why Rwanda made a beeline for the PCA rather than an alternative forum.

The significance of Rwanda’s lawsuit lies less in the money it is claiming than in the inversion of power that it reveals. The UK, once the architect of international legal norms, now finds itself being hauled before an arbitration panel for failing to cleanly exit a legally binding agreement it should not have entered. Meanwhile, Rwanda plays the role of aggrieved contractual partner, invoking rules and procedures that the UK once championed.

For the Conservative Party – read the British right – this development should serve as a warning if the party ever returns to power. While Channel crossings are real, as are capsizing incidents and public concern, the party, then in power, opted for a gesture that was bold enough to dominate headlines yet crude, instead of a credible long-term solution.

One hopes the agreement’s collapse will ultimately force a confrontation with reality. By stripping away the illusion that migration can be solved through spectacle, it compels a return to less headline-grabbing but more effective tools: diplomacy, enforcement that works and asylum systems that are fast, fair and lawful. These may be harder to “sloganise”, but they are the only solutions that endure.

Had Johnson and his Cabinet colleagues done a simple due-diligence check on Rwanda, they would have realised that the East African country did not qualify to host third-country refugees. The Israelis can confirm this.

As previously reported in this column, Israel sent about 4 000 unwanted asylum seekers to Rwanda and Uganda under a reportedly “voluntary departure scheme” from 2014 and 2018. The UK’s Guardian newspaper reported in 2022 that almost all of them were believed to have left immediately, with many attempting to make their way to Europe through people-smuggling routes.

At least one deportee still in Rwanda, who was tracked down by Israel’s Haaretz newspaper in 2018, spoke of being destitute and living on the streets of Kigali, the capital city.