By Nikolas Feith Tan, Senior Researcher at the Danish Institute for Human Rights.

Introduction
The UK-Rwanda Asylum Partnership Agreement (APA) is the latest in a line of cooperative asylum arrangements that seek to shift asylum responsibility from destination states in the Global North to countries in the developing world. Such arrangements are generally for the purpose of deterring and deflecting protection seekers and, as such, the APA should be understood as a form of externalisation, an umbrella concept for the efforts of certain states to externalise certain basic functions (in this case asylum processing and protection) in the areas of border control and asylum.
It is important to locate the APA in its broader practice of related (but not identical) arrangements, which include US third country processing of intercepted asylum seekers at Guantanamo Bay, Australian-led attempts at third country processing and protection in Nauru and Papua New Guinea (PNG), the EU-Turkey Statement, Israel’s ‘voluntary departure’ programmes involving the transfer of Eritrean and Sudanese asylum seekers to Rwanda and Uganda, and the short-lived US-Guatemala Asylum Cooperation Arrangement. Almost 20 years on, the APA also resonates with the UK’s ‘New Vision for Refugees’, which included the processing of asylum seekers in transit states after arrival in the EU. And most recently, the UK would appear to have beaten Denmark to the line in announcing a transfer arrangement with Rwanda, a policy vision reflected in Danish legislation since June 2021.
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