Senior officials in Armenia said that Britain had contacted them about A Rwanda-style deal to accommodate asylum seekers deported from the United Kingdom (UK), but talks never started.
In an increasingly desperate search for countries, Rishi Sunak’s government is said to have selected 4 other countries besides Rwanda. It is reported that Armenia, along with Côte d’Ivoire, Costa Rica and Botswana, are on the final list for “third country asylum processing agreements” prepared by the UK Ministry of Foreign Affairs after an extensive research and that negotiations are underway with the relevant countries.
The Times reported:
The [UK] government has begun talks with representatives of these countries to agree a similar UK-Rwanda agreement, but no progress has been made with all four due to ongoing problems with the Rwanda agreement.
However, the Armenian government said that although London had established initial contacts, it had not followed them up in any significant way and that the chances of such an agreement being accepted were very low. “There have been no substantive or technical discussions on the issue,” Foreign Ministry spokesperson Ani Badalyan said.
Nelly Davtyan, Deputy Head of the Interior Ministry’s Migration and Citizenship Service, said she had no information that such an agreement was being negotiated:
The Home Office, and in particular the Immigration and Citizenship Service, is not and never has been involved in such negotiations.
Deputy Foreign Minister Vahan Kostanyan stated that Armenia is facing a serious refugee crisis with the massive number of people displaced following the recent war with neighboring Azerbaijan and the loss of the Nagorno-Karabakh region.
In a statement in the capital Yerevan, he said:
The humanitarian situation in Armenia dates back to the ethnic cleansing in Nagorno-Karabakh, where more than 108,000 Armenians were forcibly displaced from their ancestral lands and sought refuge in Armenia.
To give you a single figure, we will need 1.5 billion euros just for the housing of these people.
Now we are negotiating with different private doctors and banks for this. We are allocating 100 million euros for financial support for these people and we are covering the tuition fees for students coming from Nagorno-Karabakh for university. All this means that we have a lot of problems.
