On 10 September 2019, the UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees), African Union and Rwandan government signed an agreement to transfer and host European-bound African refugees that were held at detention centres in Libya to emergency detention centres in Rwanda. Under this agreement, the parties pledged to facilitate the relocation of up to 500 people at any given time. Although both praised and criticized by the international community, this EU – Rwanda cooperation mechanism (Emergency Transit Mechanism Rwanda) might be indicative of a precarious trend of “externalization”, which is an effort to push the global migration crisis away from European borders and consequently out of public consciousness. Critics also argue that this is a violation of the refugees human rights.
The current humanitarian tragedy taking place in Libya is partially caused by the 2017 Valletta Memorandum between Italy and Libya (renewed in 2020), supported and in part financed by the EU. This agreement facilitates the interception of migrant boats by the Libyan Coast Guard (LCG), with the end goal of keeping refugees from reaching Europe. According to the recent UNHCR figures, so far this year, a total of 25,823 refugees have been intercepted during their journey to cross the Mediterranean Sea by the LCG under this EU-funded scheme. The intercepted refugees were transferred to detention centres in Libya which are notoriously plagued by egregious human rights violations, the extent of which continues to be revealed by numerous UNHCR, NGO, and watchdog reports. Despite the current fragile ceasefire, Libya has been at civil war since 2011 and is by no means a safe disembarkation port for refugees, as evidenced by a 2019 airstrike that resulted in the death of scores of migrants in a Tripoli detention centre. A UN OHCHR (Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights) report as recent as 12 October 2021, has reinstated the precarious conditions of refugees in Libya as they continue to be “criminalized solely for their migration status, routinely detained in abhorrent conditions, and are frequently subjected to torture.”
At first glance, the cooperation scheme between Rwanda and the EU may appear and operate as a path of instant relief and protection for a handful of evacuees who have been stuck in limbo along with approximately 42,000 other refugees and asylum seekers registered in the country. However, there is reason to believe that this new scheme might be emblematic of the proliferation of a wider EU policy.
This trend, which is commonly described as “externalization” within the literature, is constituted by policies aiming to shift the responsibility of protecting refugees to third countries, most often, to countries in the Global South and/or non-EU countries. It is already possible to see the formation of such policies within other European countries, blueprints of which were provided by Australia`s highly controversial third country detention regime known as the Pacific Solution. In June 2021, the Danish Parliament passed a bill enabling the government to transfer asylum seekers to detention centres in third countries.In the UK, the UK and Rwanda Migration and Economic Development Partnership was announced on 16 April, with the goal of transporting so-called “irregular” UK migrant arrivals to Rwanda for asylum processing and resettlement. However, after a ruling by the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) the first flight was grounded, leaving the future of the UK-Rwanda partnership unclear.
During a 2019 visit to the Rwanda emergency centre, the Norwegian Minister of Justice and Immigration Jøran Kallmyr reiterated Norway`s commitment to aiding Rwanda in solving “African problems on African soil”, severely mislabeling the tragedy taking place in the Mediterranean as an “African problem.”
It is highly troubling to see the proliferation of this rhetoric under the guise of cooperation agreements that can shift into a wider covert externalization policy, providing a stepping stone that will enable Europe to push this humanitarian tragedy “out of sight and out of mind.” There are potentially dire consequences to externalizing European migration policies. Aside from violations of fundamental human rights such as the right to seek asylum, the accountability for such violations will also be outsourced to third countries and consequently muddied and diminished. The unequal burdening of these third countries will therefore only exasperate the egregious human rights violations already taking place. Instead, the EU and European countries would do well in rather engaging in investment, peacebuilding and diplomacy, to try to ameliorate the conflict and instability that often is at the root of migrants leaving their countries of origin in the first place.
Mathias Hatleskog Tjønn
Mathias Hatleskog Tjønn holds an MPhil in Modern International and Transnational History from the University in Oslo (2019) and is now a PhD Fellow affiliated with the NORMS-project at the Institute for Social Research in Oslo, Norway. He has previously worked as a research assistant at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) and is interested in migrant return policies, migration, colonial history and European contemporary history.
Ayse Bala Akal
Ayse Bala Akal is a research assistant at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) and holds an MA (2020) in International Criminal and Humanitarian Law from the University of Oslo
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