Formal statistics show this Wednesday that the British government has paid nearly $2.5 million to defend its controversial plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda before courts. The government hopes that the “Rwanda plan,” approved in April 2022 by the then Prime Minister Boris Jonson, would help in stopping migrant boats heading to Britain. Meanwhile, the British Supreme Court ruled to stop the first deportation flight in June 2022 by virtue of an injunction from the European Court of Human Rights that deemed the plan illegal.
In a letter issued Wednesday by the UK Parliament’s internal affairs committee, Matthew Rickard, a senior official of the Ministry of Interior, said that the total cost of the legal pleas against “Migration and Economic Development Partnership” exceeded £2 million. It is worth noting that, so far, Britain has paid £240 million to Rwanda for the execution of the plan.