Kampala, Uganda — Proposals to send migrants to Uganda raise concerns about safety, legality and the true cost of outsourcing asylum.
Nal went to Europe in 2016, two years after Uganda enacted its Anti-Homosexuality Law, which criminalized same-sex relationships and imposed extreme penalties -- including up to life in prison. Nal, a lesbian, feared for her safety. She went to the Netherlands, where her sister lived, and planned to seek asylum once her visitor's visa expired.
Since then, Nal, who requested that Global Press Journal use only the short form of her second name to avoid jeopardizing her ongoing asylum application, says her application has been denied twice, and she has appealed a third decision.
She is allowed to stay in the Netherlands while her appeal is under review -- for now. The Netherlands and other European countries are considering whether to force asylum-seekers and other migrants to "return hubs" in other countries, including Uganda.
In October 2024, Prime Minister Dick Schoof of the Netherlands announced that his government was looking into establishing one such hub in Uganda, specifically for African asylum-seekers whose applications had been declined. That same month, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen encouraged member countries to consider using return hubs outside of the European Union. On March 11, the European Commission submitted a proposal to create hubs and expedite the removal of people who've entered EU member countries illegally. The European Parliament and Council have yet to agree on the measure.
Global Press Journal repeatedly reached out to Uganda's Ministry of Foreign Affairs for a comment on plans regarding the establishment of such a hub in the country but did not receive an official response. However, a ministry official who did not want to be named for fear of losing their job confirmed that the minister and the Dutch ambassador met in January to discuss the issue.
Governments proposing these offshore centers say it will help address the immigration crisis -- but critics fear it marks a dangerous outsourcing of responsibility to countries that have checkered human rights records.
"As a lesbian, how will the Dutch government guarantee my safety in Uganda with the Anti-Homosexuality Law in place?" Nal wonders.
Although Uganda's Constitutional Court has annulled the 2014 law that sent Nal to seek asylum in the Netherlands, the government replaced it in 2023 with another law that ranks among the world's harshest. It imposes various penalties, including life imprisonment and, in some cases, the death penalty, for attempted, suspected or even the promotion of homosexuality.
There's a high likelihood that asylum-seekers in Europe who are sent to Uganda would not be safe, says Musinguzi Ivan, an immigration and refugee lawyer based in Kampala. Plus, he says, it's not clear whether the people sent to the return hubs would arrive as tourists or refugees, or under some other designation.
If they come in as refugees, Henry Byansi, a human rights lawyer, is not overly concerned about the country's capacity to accommodate them. "Uganda," he says, "has always had an open-door policy to refugees and could manage."
A return hub in Uganda could be a good thing for the country, he adds. Uganda could leverage it for funding and negotiate better tariffs and favorable policies for migrant workers.
Uganda hosts more refugees than any other nation in Africa. About 1.7 million people, mainly from Democratic Republic of Congo and South Sudan, live here, according to the United Nations Refugee Agency. The situation for refugees throughout Africa is now particularly dire, since the United States, the primary source for aid for refugee services, announced that it would end all foreign aid programs. Refugees in settlements not only in Uganda but around the world now worry about where they'll get their next meal.
The EU has long grappled with the idea of outsourcing asylum procedures to other countries. In April 2022, the United Kingdom's Conservative government announced a partnership with Rwanda to relocate people who were in the country illegally to Rwanda.
While the costs of implementing the policy were always uncertain, UK's National Audit Office estimated the government would spend about 600 million British pounds (US$759 million) to send the first 300 people, averaging 2 million pounds per person (US$2.5 million).
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By contrast, processing a person's asylum claim within the UK costs just 106,000 pounds (US$134,000), according to the government's own data.
But after forming a new government in 2024, the UK's Labour party canceled the Rwanda return-hub scheme and redirected the money to fund a new border agency, according to the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford.
The push for return hubs is a way that EU governments are "denying responsibility for offering refugee protection," says Olivia Sandberg, an EU advocate on migration and asylum at Amnesty International, who spoke to Global Press Journal via Zoom.
The schemes are fundamentally flawed, she says. "We don't know who will be returned. We don't know who will be legally responsible, who will retain jurisdiction for those people. We don't know what will happen to them if they wouldn't be returned from there. We don't know what safeguard will be applied."
These ideas are expensive and challenging to implement, she says, and there is no transparency.
