Race, Refugees and International Crimes: Rwanda’s Role in the Transnational Legal Ordering of Criminal Justice

In April 2022 the British Government entered into an agreement to send people seeking asylum in the UK to Rwanda. This paper examines Rwanda’s role in reaching this agreement. It argues that this practice is informed by a wider set of transnational legal orders that intersect to reinforce racialised borders and to entrench economic inequalities.

The literature on the transnational legal ordering of criminal justice brings welcome attention to the recursive relationships among international, regional and national law-making on issues varying from human trafficking and money laundering to genocide. This literature, however, has paid insufficient attention to the intersections of these legal orders and the plural sets of social solidarities to which they give rise. This paper begins by tracking cases concerning Rwandan nationals accused of involvement in the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi. In doing so, it illuminates the interplay of multiple transnational legal orders, particularly those concerning immigration offences, refugee determinations and international crimes.

Looking across a dataset of 122 cases in 20 countries concerning 102 Rwandan nationals, the paper shows how the ostensible push for criminal accountability for genocide has, in practice, seen international criminal law play a key role in cases concerning extradition, deportation, revocation of citizenship and denial of asylum, alongside domestic criminal trials. A multi-sited ethnography undertaken in the UK, the US, France and South Africa then allows for an examination of the domestic work of these cross-border legal orders. Within this wider frame, the paper analyses the current judicial review of the new UK asylum policy (AAA and others v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2022] EWHC (Admin)) alongside an earlier decision not to extradite genocide suspects from the UK to Rwanda (Rwanda v Nteziryayo [2017] EWHC (Admin)). Analysed together, these two judgments show how global scripts of criminalisation interact with domestic racialised formations, giving rise to nationalist and exclusionary social solidarities.

Dr Nicola Palmer is a Reader in Law at King’s College London and the author of Courts in Conflict: Interpreting the Layers of Justice in Post-Genocide Rwanda (OUP, 2015). She has written on questions of the relationship between international criminal law and border control, resistance to mass violence, methodological approaches to transitional justice and legal pluralism in Rwanda with support from the Leverhulme Foundation, the British Academy, the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and the Rhodes Trust. Most recently her work has been published in journals including Theoretical Criminology, the Leiden Journal of International Law, the American Journal of International Law and Transnational Legal Theory. Dr Palmer was previously the Global Justice Research Fellow at St Anne’s College, University of Oxford, and convenor of the Oxford Transitional Justice Research (OTJR) network. She received her DPhil in Law from Oxford in 2011 where she studied as a Rhodes Scholar. Prior to this, she worked at the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (UN ICTR), following her undergraduate in law and economics at Rhodes University, South Africa.