Lawsuit seeks to stop US 'third-country' deportations to Equatorial Guinea

ABUJA, Nigeria (AFP) — An international coalition of lawyers filed a complaint Friday with Africa’s top human rights body to halt U.S. deportations to Equatorial Guinea, which has served as a waystation for sending people home to countries where they fear persecution.

The complaint was lodged against Equatorial Guinea at the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights, based in The Gambia, and also seeks to halt Equatorial Guinea’s onward expulsion of the deportees to their home countries.

As part of a sweeping crackdown on immigration, U.S. President Donald Trump has expanded the types of people targeted for deportation, including those with legal protections against being sent home.

In cases where Washington is legally barred from sending people home directly, it has sent deportees to countries like Equatorial Guinea.

Equatorial Guinea has then held them without charge before deporting them to their countries of origin.

“The U.S. is increasingly treating these protections as if they are a loophole that allows the U.S. to enlist third countries to effectuate return,” a statement from the five legal and human rights groups behind the lawsuit said.

Similar “third-country” deportation agreements have been struck by the United States across Africa and the world.

“The U.S. is complicit in this chain of refoulement” Beatrice Njeri, the Nairobi-based co-counsel on the case, told AFP.

The complaint was filed by U.S.-based groups Asian Americans Advancing Justice, Global Strategic Litigation Council and EG Justice, along with Gambia’s Institute for Human Rights and Development in Africa and the Tanzania-based Pan African Lawyers Union.

Neither the Equatorial Guinean government, nor the U.S. State Department, immediately responded to a request for comment.

Medical, legal access withheld

The complaint was filed on behalf of 14 deportees, some of whom are currently held in Equatorial Guinea under conditions “amounting to arbitrary and indefinite detention,” according to the lawsuit, seen by AFP.

Others have “already been forcibly removed by Equatorial Guinea to countries where they face a real risk of persecution, torture, sexual violence, imprisonment and death,” the joint statement said.

AFP has interviewed deportees sent to Equatorial Guinea, including an East African man who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border to seek asylum in 2024.

He was granted withholding of removal, a weaker protection than asylum but nonetheless considered a win in immigration court under previous administrations.

He was sent to Equatorial Guinea in January without a passport and is being held at a hotel he is barred from leaving.

At the end of May, Equatorial Guinean authorities tried to deport him to his country of origin — where he fears for his life after being tortured for alleged membership in an opposition group — though he was turned around by his home country’s border security for lacking proper paperwork, he said.

Those successfully returned home by Equatorial Guinea include “a former child slave turned anti-slavery advocate” who is now living in hiding, according to the lawyers’ statement.

The commission is being asked to order Equatorial Guinea to halt the “deportation, transfer or removal” of those it is currently holding, as well as guarantee them legal and medical access, which are currently being withheld, according to the complaint.

A small petrostate in central Africa, Equatorial Guinea has been under the authoritarian rule of Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo since 1979.

Some 32 people are thought to have been sent to Equatorial Guinea since last year, all Africans.

Neither the United States nor Equatorial Guinea have made public the actual number of deportees, or the terms of the $7.5-million deal for Equatorial Guinea to take them.

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By Agence France-Presse