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The Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) was signed in Kigali, Rwanda on April 13, 2022 by the United Kingdom's Secretary of State for the Home Department, Priti Patel, and the Rwandan Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Co-operation, Vincent Biruta. It is part of the UK Government's strategy to deal with asylum seekers, particularly those deemed to arrive "irregularly," under which Rwanda will take responsibility for those deported in return for payments from the United Kingdom, including an upfront payment of £120 million. The United Kingdom will also pay the processing and integration costs for each relocated person.

Professor Goodwin-Gill recalled that there are in fact at least three anniversaries this year—seventy years in the case of the Refugee Convention and the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and one hundred years since Fridtjof Nansen was appointed as the League's first High Commissioner for Refugees.

AbstractThe role of international organisations in international law-making tends to be downplayed in this largely State-centric world. The practice of UNHCR, however, is reason enough for a more sophisticated appreciation of the role that operational entities can play in stimulating State practice, and of how they may interact with and guide domestic courts in treaty interpretation and application. The ILC's recently completed projects on customary international law and subsequent agreements and practice encourage a cautious approach, but the high degree of judicialisation in refugee decision-making, the strong legal content in the international protection regime and the impact of UNHCR's operational activities open the way for institutional and grass-roots developments, keeping the law in closer touch with social and political realities and with the needs of those displaced.

AbstractDespite nearly 100 years of international organization and practice, international refugee law is confronted today with the critical challenges of globalization, securitization and an increasingly mobile world. Large-scale movements have exposed serious cracks in the European project; the EU's stated policy goal seems simply to keep refugees away. Elsewhere, numerous refugee situations are "protracted," while persistent underdevelopment continues to drive the movement of people between States, in a context in which States appear unable to manage "irregular" migration. If a generous asylum policy is in practice, contingent on well-controlled external borders, can the basic rules of protection survive? Or are asylum and the principle of non-return to persecution (non-refoulement) at risk in a new international legal order? These are the issues addressed below.