Rwanda

What has happened

Everything known about the seven people sent to Rwanda comes from the Rwandan government. No independent monitor, journalist, lawyer or United Nations body has reported contact with any of them in more than a year.

That is itself the finding, and it sits against the assurance in the memorandum that Rwanda would provide “access to asylum and protection systems.”

What is known about the seven, and from whom.

Government spokesperson Yolande Makolo said on 28 August 2025 that seven people had arrived earlier that month, that they had been “vetted” before arrival, and that they would receive workforce training, healthcare and accommodation support with visits from social services and IOM. She said three wished to return to their countries of origin and four wished to remain in Rwanda. Nationalities were not disclosed. Identities were not disclosed. Locations were not disclosed.

That three “wished to return” is a statement of intention relayed by the receiving government, not an outcome. Whether they have been returned, and to where, is not established.

Whether anyone has been sent since August 2025 is reported but not established.

CBS News reported on 30 August 2026, on internal government documents, that three ICE flights over about ten days “dropped off dozens of men and women expelled from the U.S. in Burundi, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Equatorial Guinea, Eswatini, Liberia, Rwanda and Sierra Leone.” It gave country-level detail for Sierra Leone and the Central African Republic, not for Rwanda: no date, no number, no nationalities. Rwanda has not confirmed any post-August-2025 arrival, unlike August 2025 when it confirmed within days. Neither specialist tracker records a second transfer.

The supportable formulation is that Rwanda was placed among the destinations of three flights in late August 2026 by CBS News relying on internal documents, and that nothing has corroborated it since.

The arrangement, and what it cost

The memorandum says it creates nothing.

Section 3.2: “Nothing in this Memorandum creates any rights or obligations under Rwandan law, U.S. law, or international law.” Section 5 provides that it does not establish “in any manner whatsoever, rights of any kind in favor of any third party.” Section 6.2 allows either participant to discontinue at any time, and discontinuation “does not require acceptance by the other Participant.”

The protection assurance at section 2.2, that Rwanda will act in accordance with the Refugee Convention and the Convention against Torture “including prevention of refoulement and access to asylum and protection systems,” is therefore expressly incapable of creating an obligation under international law. It is a statement of intent inside an instrument that disclaims obligation.

Retrieved from the State Department Case Act library, file 2025-0028QN.

The money and the cap are in the text, not merely reported.

Section 1.2: the United States intends to “Provide Rwanda with an upfront disbursement of USD 7,500,000 to strengthen Rwanda’s border and migration management capacity.” Section 2.3: Rwanda intends to “Facilitate access for the United States to remove up to 250 TCNs to Rwanda after Rwanda has approved their removal.” Seven of up to 250 are confirmed received.

The United States does not have to tell Rwanda that a person holds protection against being sent home.

Annex A sets out what the United States provides about each person: a list of persons, demographic information, “Criminal records, criminal investigations, or security issues, if applicable,” an estimated schedule, and “Any special needs and/or health issues.”

There is no requirement to disclose that an individual holds withholding of removal, protection under the Convention against Torture, or any judicial finding that they face persecution or torture. Annex A also sets a target of executing the flight within 96 hours of Rwandan confirmation.

A receiving state cannot honour an assurance about onward transfer if it is not told which of the people it receives a court has already found would be tortured at home.

A Senate committee has put a price on the transfers, and documented a man sent to Rwanda whose own country was willing to take him.

The minority staff of the United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations published At What Cost: Inside the Trump Administration’s Secret Deportation Deals on 13 February 2026. Its cost chart, current to 31 January 2026, gives Rwanda a payment of $7.5 million, an estimated round-trip flight cost of $601,864, seven third-country nationals received, and an estimated cost per person of $1.1 million. For comparison the same chart gives El Salvador $20,755 per person, Equatorial Guinea $282,126, and Eswatini $413,333.

The passage that matters most is not about money:

“The Laos government was told it had less than 24 hours to prepare travel documents for a Lao national or he would be sent to Rwanda. Despite a willingness to produce the travel documents, Laos was unable to do so in time, and this individual was deported to Rwanda at an estimated cost of more than $85,000 per person.”

The same section of the report records two further instances. Of a Cambodian national sent to Eswatini, his attorney is quoted: “I know that ICE did not request a travel document from Cambodia but may have requested one from Thailand, where he is not a citizen or national.” Of a Laotian national sent to Eswatini, the report states that court filings say “the U.S. Government deported him despite having a travel document to repatriate him to Laos,” and that an officer at the Embassy of Laos in Washington said he “was sure the Lao Government has agreed to accept him to Laos and his travel document was issued.”

U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Minority Report, 13 February 2026, 30 pages, read in full from the Committee’s own PDF. The cost chart is at page 8 and the passages above at page 13. The support for the Laos passage is footnote 31, “Committee Minority staff meetings with advocates, Dec. 2025”: it is what Senate staff were told, not a document they published. The Third Country Deportation Watch profile that led the Coalition to this report dates it 17 February 2026; the document’s own header says 13 February, and the document is followed here.

What the record says about Rwanda itself

The United Kingdom Supreme Court has ruled on this exact question, and the ruling is narrower than it is usually reported to be.

Rwanda is the only receiving state against which a court of last resort in another country has decided whether transfers to it are lawful. On 15 November 2023 the United Kingdom Supreme Court dismissed the Home Secretary’s appeal, unanimously.

“we conclude that the Court of Appeal was correct to reverse the decision of the Divisional Court, and was entitled to find that there are substantial grounds for believing that the removal of the claimants to Rwanda would expose them to a real risk of ill-treatment by reason of refoulement. It was accordingly correct to hold that the Secretary of State’s policy is unlawful.”

The three matters the court relied on are named at paragraph 74: “the general human rights situation in Rwanda; the adequacy of Rwanda’s asylum system, including its history of refoulement; and Rwanda’s non-compliance with assurances given under the arrangement which it entered into with Israel.”

What the court did not decide. Some of the claimants had also argued that removal was unlawful because they were at risk of ill-treatment inside Rwanda itself. At paragraph 106 the court declined to reach it: “in the light of our conclusion on the issue of refoulement it is unnecessary for us to determine them.” The holding is about onward removal, not about how Rwanda treats the people it receives. This page says so because the judgment is often cited for the wider proposition.

On what was and was not shown, at paragraph 105: “The structural changes and capacity-building needed to eliminate that risk may be delivered in the future, but they were not shown to be in place at the time when the lawfulness of the policy had to be considered in these proceedings.”

R (on the application of AAA (Syria) and others) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2023] UKSC 42, on appeal from [2023] EWCA Civ 745. Joint judgment of Lord Reed and Lord Lloyd-Jones, with whom Lord Hodge, Lord Briggs and Lord Sales agreed. Read in full, 56 pages, from the Supreme Court’s own PDF rather than from its press summary. Two further facts stated elsewhere on this page, that Parliament later legislated to declare Rwanda safe and that the scheme was abandoned, are not part of this verification and are not yet pinned to their own sources.

Six people were expelled from Kigali airport, and the court said carefully why that does not automatically carry over to a pre-approved scheme.

At paragraph 87 the court recorded evidence from UNHCR of six recent cases of expulsion of people who claimed asylum on arrival at Kigali airport, “some of which resulted in refoulement or would have done so if UNHCR had not intervened”:

“Two Libyans were removed from the airport in February 2021 and sent to Egypt; a person from Yemen was removed from the airport in September 2021 and sent to Ethiopia, where UNHCR intervened to prevent his onward refoulement to Yemen; two Afghans were refouled to Afghanistan (via Dubai) on 24 March 2022, while the MEDP was being negotiated; and a Syrian was refouled to Syria (via Turkey) on 19 April 2022, after the MEDP had been concluded.”

The court added that there may be other cases, because “UNHCR does not maintain a presence at the airport, and only learns of such occurrences if they are contacted,” and that the evidence is uncontested, though Rwanda disputes calling these cases refoulement. At paragraph 89 it recorded that the court below had been given a table of “at least 100 allegations of refoulement and threatened refoulement” drawn from UNHCR’s evidence and from notes of meetings with Home Office officials.

The qualification travels with the finding, and this page prints it. At paragraph 88:

“The cases of airport refoulement do not establish that there would be a risk of similar refoulement under the MEDP, since asylum seekers arriving in Rwanda under the MEDP would have been pre-approved by the government of Rwanda and would arrive on planned flights.”

The court nonetheless treated the cases as illustrating what Lord Justice Underhill had called “a culture of, at best, insufficient appreciation by DGIE officials of Rwanda’s obligations under the Refugee Convention, and at worst a deliberate disregard for those obligations.”

Two facts sit beside each other here and the reader can hold both. People arriving under the United Kingdom scheme would have been pre-approved by Rwanda and would arrive on planned flights. Under the memorandum with the United States, at section 2.3, Rwanda facilitates removals “after Rwanda has approved their removal,” and Annex A sets a target of executing the flight within 96 hours of Rwandan confirmation.

[2023] UKSC 42, paragraphs 87 to 89. Memorandum of understanding, State Department Case Act library file 2025-0028QN, section 2.3 and Annex A. Note on sourcing: a research summary supplied to the Coalition described the Libyans as simply “expelled” and gave the airport cases without paragraph 88. The judgment says they were sent to Egypt, and paragraph 88 is the court’s own limit on the point. The document governs.

Rwanda had already given a written non-refoulement assurance to another state, with monitoring, and it was not kept.

This is the part of the judgment that bears most directly on the arrangement the United States has made. Israel entered an agreement with Rwanda at the end of 2013, in operation until 2018. At paragraph 95 the court records, quoting the Supreme Court of Israel in Sagitta v Minister of Interior, that the agreement “includes an explicit undertaking of [Rwanda] according to which the deportees will enjoy human rights and freedoms and that the principle of non-refoulement shall be complied with,” and that there were “mechanisms for supervising and monitoring its implementation.”

Paragraph 96, in full:

“There is no dispute that persons who were relocated under the agreement suffered serious breaches of their rights under the Refugee Convention. UNHCR found that asylum seekers who arrived in Rwanda under the arrangement were routinely moved clandestinely to Uganda. It provided evidence relating to more than 100 nationals of Eritrea and Sudan who had arrived in Rwanda under the agreement during 2015 and 2016 and had then been taken to the Ugandan border or put on flights to Uganda. In three cases, refoulement to Eritrea (via Kenya) had only been prevented by UNHCR’s intervention. The Rwandan government’s response to this evidence lacked substance.”

On what the sending government did about it, at paragraph 98: ministers and officials “do not appear to have investigated why it had failed, or attempted to obtain information about the terms of the agreement or the assurances which the Rwandan government had given.” The same paragraph quotes a review carried out for the Independent Advisory Group on Country Information finding that under the Israeli arrangement “the majority of asylum seekers were not able to access asylum in Rwanda, and were therefore forced to travel onward from Rwanda, in what may amount to a situation of indirect refoulement.”

The court also recorded, at paragraph 68, why UNHCR’s evidence carried the weight it did: UNHCR “has unrivalled practical experience of the working of the asylum system in Rwanda through long years of engagement,” has operated permanently in Rwanda since 1993, and had 332 staff there at the time of its evidence.

[2023] UKSC 42, paragraphs 68 and 95 to 98. The Israeli decision referred to is Sagitta v Minister of Interior, Administrative Appeal 8101/15, heard 9 October 2016, which the United Kingdom court read in an unofficial translation.

Amnesty International records the pattern the arrangement sits inside.

“after the conclusion of the respective third-country removals agreements, Liberia, Rwanda, and Uganda managed to secure US investments into their health sector under the US government’s America First Global Health Strategy.”

Amnesty International, AFR 01/1031/2026, 12 May 2026. Amnesty’s 2026 annual report records the seven arrivals in its Rwanda entry.

Nine months after paying Rwanda to accept these people, the United States sanctioned Rwanda’s army.

On 3 June 2025 the United States agreed to pay Rwanda $7,500,000 and accepted its assurance that transferees would not be persecuted or tortured. On 2 March 2026 the Department of the Treasury designated the Rwanda Defence Force and four senior officers, under Executive Order 13413 as amended by Executive Order 13671, in a release headed Treasury Sanctions Rwanda Officials, Condemns Blatant Violations of Washington Peace Accords. The release states that the Rwanda Defence Force “has provided direct operational support to M23 and its affiliates” and that “M23 has engaged in extrajudicial killings, arbitrary arrests, and torture.”

Read that carefully, because it is easy to overstate. The finding of torture is about M23 in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, not about how Rwanda treats people transferred to it, and the designation concerns the conflict rather than the transfer arrangement. What the two documents establish together is narrower and still worth recording: the same government that certified Rwanda’s assurance against torture in June 2025 sanctioned Rwanda’s army nine months later for supporting a force it says commits torture.

U.S. Department of the Treasury, press release sb0411, 2 March 2026. The four officers named are Vincent Nyakarundi, Ruki Karusisi, Mubarakh Muganga and Stanislas Gashugi. Memorandum of understanding, State Department Case Act library file 2025-0028QN, 3 June 2025.

Rwanda was giving the United States individual no-torture assurances sixteen years ago, and the United States moved to strip three men of their protection on the strength of them.

This is not a new mechanism. In 2009 three Rwandan nationals held deferral of removal under the Convention against Torture, granted against Rwanda. They had been held for two years at Kami camp, which they described as “an unofficial detention center to which only the RPA had access,” and had confessed there. A United States federal court had already suppressed those confessions as coerced and as products of torture.

The District Court for the District of Columbia recorded what happened next:

“On August 25, 2009, ICE notified the plaintiffs that it was considering terminating their deferrals of removal based on diplomatic assurances the Department of State had received from Rwanda’s Chief Prosecutor and the Rwandan Minister of Justice that none of the plaintiffs would be tortured if removed to Rwanda.”

A footnote adds that Rwanda also assured the Department of State that any prosecution would comply with Rwandan and international law, “and that none of the plaintiffs’ previously coerced confessions would be used against them.” The men were given until 6 November 2009 to submit written evidence why the assurances should not be credited. They argued this denied them due process because there was no hearing before a neutral and impartial decision-maker, and no guarantee they would see the full record or be told when a decision was made.

The court did not reach any of that. It denied a preliminary injunction on ripeness grounds, no final decision having been made. Its closing footnote reads:

“The court appreciates the very real danger the plaintiffs may face if they are returned to Rwanda, and reiterates that this decision was made on ripeness grounds alone.”

Karake v. United States Department of Homeland Security, 672 F. Supp. 2d 49 (D.D.C. 7 December 2009), Urbina J, read in full. The suppression ruling referred to is United States v. Karake, 443 F. Supp. 2d 8, 85-86 (D.D.C. 2006), which the Coalition has not read in full. Whether the deferrals were ultimately terminated, and whether these three men were removed to Rwanda, is not established.

The case that cuts the other way, and it belongs here.

Omar Ameen is an Iraqi whom an immigration judge granted relief under the Convention against Torture, having rejected the terrorism allegations against him. He was then held by immigration authorities while the government looked for a country that would take him. His lawyers at the University of Chicago Law School’s Immigrants’ Rights Clinic and Immigrant Legal Defense filed habeas petitions challenging his detention and, later, the government’s failure to find a country to send him to. The clinic’s own account:

“In April 2025, under pressure from the court, the government reached an agreement to resettle Mr. Ameen in Rwanda.”

And on what followed: “He reports being happy to be free and he is adjusting to life in his new country.”

So the United States sent a man holding protection against torture in his own country to Rwanda, and on the account of his own lawyers he is free there. No source reports that Rwanda has moved him on, or towards Iraq. A page that prints the Israel arrangement and the airport expulsions has to print this too, and readers can weigh it.

University of Chicago Law School, Immigrants’ Rights Clinic, Significant Achievements for 2024-25. This is the account of his own counsel, not an independent monitor or a court finding, and it does not say what legal status he holds in Rwanda or how long it lasts. The transfer predates the memorandum of 3 June 2025 and is not one of the seven.

A United States court of appeals has published a finding that conditions in Rwandan military facilities may amount to torture, in a case where that finding was the reason relief was refused.

In Munyakazi v. Lynch the Fourth Circuit recorded what the immigration judge and the Board had found:

“The agency found that Munyakazi suffered harsh treatment during his previous incarceration, and that conditions in Rwandan military facilities may rise to the level of torture. However, the agency found that genocide perpetrators were held in civilian, not military, detention facilities and that conditions in those facilities, while harsh by American standards, do not amount to torture.”

Two things follow, and the second matters as much as the first. The finding about military facilities is on the published record of a United States court of appeals. And it was the reason the claim failed: the distinction between military and civilian detention was what allowed the agency to conclude the petitioner would be safe. The petition was denied.

Munyakazi v. Lynch, 829 F.3d 291, 302 (4th Cir. 2016), published. The words quoted are the Fourth Circuit’s report of the immigration judge’s finding, adopted by the Board, which the court refers to collectively as “the agency” and reviewed only for substantial evidence. They are not the court’s own conclusion about Rwanda.

The contrary decision, and it is binding.

In 2021 the Board of Immigration Appeals published a precedential decision denying deferral of removal to a Rwandan national convicted in absentia by a gacaca court and sentenced to thirty years. The Board held:

“Based on the entirety of the record, we agree that the respondent has not established that it is more likely than not that he will be tortured upon return to Rwanda, nor has he established that such torture would be ‘inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity.'”

The reasoning rested on expert testimony that people convicted in absentia by gacaca courts have those verdicts annulled and are retried on return, and would be held in a modern, regularly inspected facility.

The Coalition publishes this because it is binding precedent, because it is recent, and because a page that recorded only the material pointing one way would be worth less. It should be read alongside what the Subcommittee on Prevention of Torture was unable to do in 2017 and what Human Rights Watch documented in 2024, and readers can weigh those together.

Matter of O-R-E-, 28 I&N Dec. 330, 349 (BIA 2021), Interim Decision #4023, decided 21 July 2021. Precedential.

There is a court you can file in, and you have two months

Read this first if you or someone you know is detained here now.

This country is a member of the East African Community. Its Court of Justice, sitting at Arusha, is open to any person resident in a Partner State. You do not need this country to have signed anything extra. You do not have to go through the local courts first.

But the time limit is two months, and it runs from the day the detention began, not the day it ends.

Article 30(2) of the Treaty establishing the East African Community requires proceedings to be brought “within two months of the enactment, publication, directive, decision or action complained of, or in the absence thereof, of the day in which it came to the knowledge of the complainant.”

The Court’s Appellate Division has held that this is absolute. In a case brought by men who had been seized in one country, taken to another and were still in detention when they filed, the Court said:

“The Court finds the Respondents’ argument that when the act complained of is a continuous detention, the starting date for computation of its limitation time is the day when it ceases is erroneous… nowhere does the Treaty provide any power to the Court to extend, to condone, to waive, or to modify the prescribed time limit for any reason (including for ‘continuing violations’).”

“the starting date of an act complained of under Article 30(2), (including the detention of a complainant), is not the day the act ends, but the day it is first effected.”

Their case was struck out while they were still held. If you have been detained for more than two months, this door has probably closed. If you have been detained for less than two months, it is open today and will not be open for long.

The one narrow exception, and it is about concealment.

Where a state hid the detention, the Court has allowed a case to proceed because the state could not show when the applicant or their family learned of it. That is a point about who must prove what, not a doctrine that a continuing detention restarts the clock. If your detention was concealed from your family, say so, and say when they found out, because the date they found out may be the date that counts.

What you can and cannot ask the Court to decide.

This matters, and getting it wrong loses the case at the door. The Court has no human rights jurisdiction as such. The protocol that was supposed to give it one, under Article 27(2) of the Treaty, has never been agreed.

What the Court can do is interpret the Treaty, and it has held that a state breaches the Treaty when it breaks the rule of law. The obligations to use are Article 6(d), which binds Partner States to good governance including “adherence to the principles of democracy, the rule of law” and “the recognition, promotion and protection of human and peoples rights in accordance with the provisions of the African Charter”, and Article 7(2), by which states undertake to abide by “the maintenance of universally accepted standards of human rights”.

The Court put its own position this way:

“While the Court will not assume jurisdiction to adjudicate on human rights disputes, it will not abdicate from exercising its jurisdiction of interpretation under Article 27(1) merely because the Reference includes allegation of human rights violation.”

So the claim must be framed as a breach of the Treaty, not as a human rights violation. A case pleaded the other way round is likely to fail on jurisdiction without anyone looking at what happened to you.

One more limit, and it bites on people transferred here.

The Court has protected a person turned back at an airport and briefly detained, but on the basis of free movement rights that belong to citizens of Partner States. It said expressly that the national immigration law remains applicable “where citizens of other nations, except the Partner States, are concerned.” A person transferred here from outside East Africa cannot use that route and has only the rule of law argument under Articles 6(d) and 7(2).

Treaty for the Establishment of the East African Community, Articles 6(d), 7(2), 27, 30 and 38, from the text published by the East African Legislative Assembly. Attorney General of the Republic of Uganda v Omar Awadh and 6 Others, Appeal No. 2 of 2012, Appellate Division, 15 April 2013. Attorney General of the Republic of Kenya v Independent Medical Legal Unit, Appeal No. 1 of 2011, 15 March 2012. Katabazi and 21 Others v Secretary General of the East African Community, Reference No. 1 of 2007, 1 November 2007. Samuel Mukira Mohochi v Attorney General of Uganda, Reference No. 5 of 2011, 17 May 2013. Attorney General of Rwanda v Plaxeda Rugumba, Appeal No. 1 of 2012, 1 June 2012. Checked 8 September 2026. The Coalition is reading these provisions and judgments, not advising on them, and a lawyer admitted in the region should settle how a particular case is framed.

What the judgment is worth if you win.

Article 38(3) requires a Partner State to take the measures needed to implement a judgment “without delay”, and Article 33(2) gives the Court’s decisions precedence over national court decisions on the same matter. Article 44 provides for execution, but only of judgments imposing a pecuniary obligation, and only through the ordinary civil procedure of the state concerned. There is no body that monitors compliance and no sanction if a state ignores the Court. The Coalition could find no published figure for how often states comply.

Which complaint routes are open, and which are closed

This page has so far described what has happened. This section describes what a person in Rwanda can do about it. The answer is narrower than for any other country in this project, and it is narrow for reasons that are on the public record and dated.

Closed: individual complaint to the United Nations Committee against Torture.

Rwanda acceded to the Convention against Torture on 15 December 2008. It has never made the declaration under article 22 by which a state recognises the competence of the Committee to receive communications from individuals. In the depositary’s own record Rwanda appears once, in the ratification table, and is absent from the list of sixty-five states that have accepted individual complaints. It has made no reservations, and it has not made the inter-state declaration under article 21 either.

The consequence is flat. No person in Rwanda, and nobody acting on their behalf, can bring a case to the Committee against Torture. The Committee has no competence to receive one.

This is the point on which Rwanda differs from Cameroon, which accepted individual complaints on 12 October 2000, and resembles Sierra Leone, Uganda, the Central African Republic and Cabo Verde, which have not.

United Nations Treaty Collection, chapter IV-9, the depositary’s own record, checked 8 September 2026. Note that Rwanda acceded to the Convention rather than signing and ratifying it; the depositary marks this with an “a”.

Closed since 1 March 2017: going directly to the African Court.

Rwanda made the declaration under article 34(6) of the Protocol to the African Charter on 22 January 2013, which allowed individuals and non-governmental organisations to bring cases to the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights without going through the African Commission. On 24 February 2016 it gave notice of withdrawal, deposited the instrument on 29 February and notified the Court on 1 March 2016.

Rwanda’s stated reason, in its own note verbale, was that a person it described as a genocide convict and a fugitive from justice had used the declaration to secure a right to be heard.

The African Court held in Ingabire Victoire Umuhoza v. Rwanda, on 3 June 2016, that the withdrawal could not take effect immediately and required twelve months’ notice, so it took effect on 1 March 2017. Cases already pending were not affected.

Dates from the African Court’s own record and from O. Windridge, “Assessing Rwexit,” (2018) 2 African Human Rights Yearbook 243, and the Centre for Human Rights, University of Pretoria, report of 2016. The Coalition has not obtained the note verbale itself and quotes it only as those sources report it.

Open: communication to the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights.

The withdrawal did not close the African system. Rwanda has not withdrawn from the Protocol itself, so the Commission’s own communication procedure remains available, and the Commission may still refer a matter to the Court. What was removed is the direct route. A person now has to go through the Commission, which is slower, and which cannot be started by the individual filing at the Court.

Centre for Human Rights, University of Pretoria, 2016: by not undoing its ratification of the Court Protocol, Rwanda still accepts the Court’s jurisdiction in respect of cases referred to it by the Commission. The Coalition has not yet identified a decided communication against Rwanda before the Commission, and records that as open below.

Not open: preventive inspection under the Optional Protocol.

Rwanda acceded to the Optional Protocol on 30 June 2015. That should have produced two things: visits by the United Nations Subcommittee on Prevention of Torture, and a national preventive mechanism.

The Subcommittee came in October 2017 and did not finish. It suspended its visit on 19 October 2017 and announced the suspension the following day. In its own words, in its eleventh annual report:

“the Subcommittee suspended its visit to Rwanda on 19 October owing to difficulties in effectively exercising its visiting mandate in accordance with the provisions of the Optional Protocol. That was only the third time in 10 years of work that the Subcommittee found it necessary to suspend a mission.”

In June 2018 it terminated the visit. From its twelfth annual report:

“the Subcommittee also decided to terminate its visit to Rwanda that had been suspended in October 2017, due to a lack of cooperation from the Government.”

The Subcommittee noted that on two previous occasions it had paused a visit and the problems were resolved and the visits completed. Here that did not prove possible. This was the first time the Subcommittee had terminated a visit.

The delegation head, Arman Danielyan, said at the time of the suspension:

“We have been barred from completing our work in some places, and grave limitations have been imposed on granting access to certain places of detention… We have also been unable to carry out private and confidential interviews with some persons deprived of their liberty. Moreover, many of those we have managed to interview have expressed fears of reprisals. We must not place the persons that have cooperated with us in danger.”

A national preventive mechanism was designated only afterwards, by Law No. 61/2018 of 24 August 2018, in force 17 September 2018. It is the National Commission for Human Rights. Human Rights Watch says in its own voice that the Commission “is not independent and has been unable or unwilling to report on cases of torture,” and that “it has consistently stated that no cases of torture and ill-treatment have been recorded in detention.”

CAT/C/63/4 paragraph 15 and CAT/C/66/2 paragraphs 11 and 38, the Subcommittee’s own annual reports. OHCHR press release, 20 October 2017. Human Rights Watch, “‘They Threw Me in the Water and Beat Me’: The Need for Accountability for Torture in Rwanda,” 15 October 2024, by Clementine de Montjoye. Accession dates from the United Nations Treaty Collection, chapter IV-9-b.

No independent monitoring of the prisons.

Human Rights Watch reports that since 2021 the government has not allowed the International Committee of the Red Cross to monitor prison conditions “according to the ICRC’s standards,” causing the ICRC to discontinue its prison monitoring in the country, and that “there is no independent monitoring of prison conditions in Rwanda today.”

Human Rights Watch, 15 October 2024. Human Rights Watch’s source for the ICRC point is the United States State Department’s 2021 country report rather than its own research, and the qualifier “according to the ICRC’s standards” is part of what it says.

Rwanda has not reported to the Committee against Torture since 2017.

Rwanda’s third periodic report was due on 6 December 2021. As at 8 September 2026 it has not been submitted, and no document symbol for it exists. A separate one-year follow-up report, due 6 December 2018, is also outstanding; the Committee sent a reminder on 21 May 2019. The last review was at the Committee’s 62nd session in November 2017, and the concluding observations, CAT/C/RWA/CO/2, were adopted on 4 December 2017.

United Nations Treaty Body Database, reporting status for Rwanda, checked 8 September 2026.

The first days

The section above sets out what is closed in Rwanda, and it is more than anywhere else in this project: no complaint to the United Nations Committee against Torture, no direct route to the African Court since March 2017, a Subcommittee visit that was terminated rather than completed, and no independent monitoring of the prisons since the International Committee of the Red Cross stopped in 2021.

What exists is a national commission that is the designated mechanism against torture and has an unusually wide statutory power to visit, a bar association that runs a toll-free legal aid line and a pro bono request service, an ICRC delegation that no longer monitors prisons generally but does issue attestations of detention on request, and a refugee agency with protection hotlines and a weekly litigation desk.

Who is reachable in Rwanda

One distinction to keep. The United Nations refugee agency runs an Emergency Transit Mechanism at Gashora in Bugesera District, which since September 2019 has received people voluntarily evacuated from detention in Libya under a memorandum with the Government of Rwanda and the African Union, extended to December 2026. That is a voluntary evacuation arrangement and it is not the transfers this page is about. It should not be cited as though Rwanda has an established system for receiving people sent against their will.

What this page still does not know

Whether the National Commission for Human Rights has visited anyone transferred to Rwanda under this arrangement, and whether its 2026 impact assessment of detention monitoring covers any of them. A direct telephone number for that commission, whose contact page does not load. Whether the International Committee of the Red Cross has issued an attestation of detention to anyone in this group. Whether the Subcommittee on Prevention of Torture will conduct the visit listed for 2026, eight years after it terminated the last one. Whether any communication has been brought against Rwanda before the African Commission arising from these transfers. And what, if anything, a person transferred to Rwanda is told about any of the above.

If you know any of these, the Coalition wants to hear from you.

The dated record

Every entry below is a fact with a source.

What is not established

The Coalition publishes what it can source and says plainly what it cannot. The following is open on this page.

Whether any transfer occurred after August 2025. The nationalities, identities and current situation of the seven. Whether the three who wished to return home have been returned, and to where. The Rwandan signature date on the memorandum, which the scan does not resolve. Whether the $7.5 million was in fact disbursed. And the United Kingdom Supreme Court judgment, which needs reading in full before a word of it is published.

Added 8 September 2026, and checked. A monitoring profile relied on by the Coalition states that two ICE flights to Rwanda were tracked on 16 and 17 August 2025. The Human Rights First report cited for that says only: “In August 2025, ICE Flight Monitor tracked the first flight to Rwanda under a newly established U.S.-Rwanda agreement.” One flight, no dates. This page therefore gives no flight dates and no flight count.

The same profile reports that the memorandum requires Rwanda to provide transferees “appropriate legal status” under Rwandan law, and that the Department of Homeland Security acknowledged the transfers in a declaration of 5 March 2026 in the D.V.D. litigation. Neither could be checked. The copy of the memorandum it links is behind a block, and the declaration is not on the district court docket for March 2026 or on the First Circuit docket in No. 26-1212. Both are recorded here as reported and unverified.

Also unverified, and so not relied on above: a payment of $100,000 said to have been made in April 2025 for the acceptance of a single Iraqi refugee, and a provision of the United Kingdom’s later treaty said to bar onward removal from Rwanda.

Whether the African Commission route has ever been used against Rwanda. The Coalition has not identified a decided communication against Rwanda before the African Commission. That the route exists is established. That it works is not, and the page should not imply otherwise until a decided case is found.

Whether the national preventive mechanism has visited anyone. Human Rights Watch says the National Commission for Human Rights is not independent and has consistently reported that no cases of torture have been recorded. Whether it conducts visits at all, and what it does with them, is not established here.

What a person transferred to Rwanda is told about any of this. Nothing in the memorandum of understanding, as far as the Coalition has seen it, addresses complaint routes, monitoring or legal advice.