Spirited away: The fading importance of resettlement in the emergency transit mechanism in Rwanda

On 10 October, 123 refugees were evacuated from Libya to Rwanda. This is the second evacuation under the new emergency transit mechanism (ETM) set up in September by the government of Rwanda, the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and the African Union (AU), and funded by the AU and the European Union (EU). The ETMs – a humanitarian scheme – threaten to be co-opted by politics as they are changing in their very nature, with resettlement increasingly off the table.