Norway agreed to move about 500 evacuated individuals to Rwanda from Libyan detention centres, Rwanda’s foreign minister claimed on Wednesday.
In September, Rwanda signed an agreement with the United Nations in order to help resettling detained people in Libya while they were trying to reach Europe.
Before signing the agreement, the United Nations estimated that around 4,700 people seeking refuge were estimated to be in Libyan detention centres, some of them run by militias and under siege amid civil war.
Since 2011, smugglers have exploited the turmoil in Libya to send hundreds of thousands migrants on dangerous journeys across the central Mediterranean. Though the number of crossings dropped sharply from 2017 during an EU-backed push to block departures.