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German official has proposed sending asylum seekers to facilities in Rwanda funded by the UK.
Published On 7 Sep 2024
A German official has proposed sending asylum seekers to facilities in Rwanda funded by the United Kingdom, weeks after the UK discarded its own Rwanda deportation plan.
Germany’s Special Representative for Migration Agreements Joachim Stamp said the European Union could utilise existing asylum facilities in Rwanda, which were initially intended for Britain’s 2022 plan to send undocumented refugees and migrants to the East African nation.
That plan was scrapped by UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s new government in July after being declared unlawful by the UK High Court.
On Thursday, in a podcast by Table Media, Germany’s Stamp said that Rwanda has publicly expressed its willingness to continue implementing this model.
“We currently have no country that has come forward, with the exception of Rwanda,” he said, emphasising that the proposal would specifically target refugees and migrants crossing the EU’s eastern borders, which he estimated at around 10,000 people annually.
The suggestion comes as the German government faces mounting pressure to address undocumented migration amid rising far-right sentiment and recent electoral gains by the anti-immigration Alternative for Deutschland (AfD) party.
Stamp, who belongs to the Free Democratic party (a smaller partner in Germany’s governing coalition) and works in the Interior Ministry, has dismissed broader proposals from the conservative opposition to apply such a model to all refugees.
German Ambassador to the UK Miguel Berger said that it is different from the UK’s scheme.
“There is no plan of the German government to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda,” he said. “The discussion is about processing asylum applications in third countries under international humanitarian law and with support of the UN.”
Under the British plan, asylum seekers sent to Rwanda would stay there if their claim was accepted but would not be allowed to return to the UK. Otherwise, they could apply to settle in the country on other grounds or seek asylum in a different country.
Legal challenges kept people from being deported from the UK to Rwanda, but accommodation for migrants, funded by the UK, had already been built in the capital Kigali.
