Wed 11 September 2019:
Rwanda agreed Tuesday to take in hundreds and potentially thousands of African refugees and asylum-seekers stranded in Libya, a deal the African Union hopes to replicate with other member states.
“We will be receiving the initial number of 500 in a few weeks,” Hope Tumukunde Gasatura, Rwanda’s ambassador to the AU, told a news conference after signing a memorandum of understanding alongside representatives of the AU and the UN refugee agency UNHCR.
The first group “is principally made up of people originating from the Horn of Africa,” the AU and the UN said in a statement.
They will be housed in a transit centre in Rwanda before being resettled elsewhere unless they agree to return to their home countries, if it is safe to do so.
Germaine Kamayirese, the Rwandan minister for emergency management, told journalists in Kigali that “some may be given permission to remain in Rwanda”.
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