A senior Ugandan minister acknowledged for the first time on Friday that his country was “positively considering” a request by Israel to accept African asylum seekers.
Ecweru denied that Israel was paying Uganda to take the asylum seekers, saying that the only motivation was humanitarian.
“The people saying on social media that countries give us money whenever we accept refugees to come in is false,” he said. “In fact, we are the ones who spend on these refugees.”
He also denied reports that Uganda had already accepted refugees from Israel.
“To my knowledge, no refugees from Israel have come in yet,” he said. “If they are here, they are trespassers.”
The Israeli government has until 12 p.m. on Sunday, April 15, to present the High Court of Justice with a finalized plan for the deportation of African migrants. Israel dispatched a special envoy to an unnamed country earlier this week, widely reported to be Uganda, to finalize an agreement.
Until now, Uganda has consistently denied that a deportation deal with Israel exists, despite reports that it was accepting migrants deported from Israel.
Uganda’s Foreign Minister Henry Okello Oryem said in a statement last week that his nation would “insist that the airlines return [the asylum seekers] to the country where they came from… We do not have a contract, any understanding, formal or informal, with Israel for them to dump their refugees here.”
Israel’s previous expulsion plans were based on “voluntary deportations,” meaning asylum seekers would sign a document stating they had left Israel by choice, and receive a $3,500 grant and a plane ticket to Rwanda or Uganda.
About 1,700 asylum seekers were “willingly deported” to Uganda in the past three years, but the government wants future deportations to take place much faster, at the rate of around 600 per month, rather than 600 per year. For this to happen, it needs a country that will accept asylum seekers who were forcibly deported, a stance that is unpopular in the international community.
A news report on Friday said visas issued by Israel, purportedly on behalf of Uganda, to African asylum seekers as they are about to leave the country are “totally fake.”
Forced deportations to a third country are largely unprecedented in the Western world. Italy and Australia signed similar agreements with third-party countries — Italy with Libya, and Australia with Malaysia — but both proposals were shot down by local courts. In both cases, courts ruled the bills inconsistent with international law and the 1951 UN convention on refugees — to which Israel is also a party.
There are approximately 38,000 African asylum seekers in Israel, mostly from Eritrea and Sudan.
Asylum seekers who were “willingly deported” to Uganda and Rwanda in the past have told The Times of Israel they faced serious danger and even imprisonment after arriving in Africa without proper documents, and were not allowed to stay in Rwanda but forced to cross the border illegally to other countries.