DAKAR, SENEGAL — Human rights legal teams have initiated a high-stakes legal challenge against Equatorial Guinea at the African Union’s premier human rights watchdog, alleging the Central African nation has violated fundamental human rights by forcibly transferring U.S.-deported migrants onward to their home countries where they face targeted persecution.
The complaint, filed Friday with the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights (ACHPR), calls for the regional body to immediately order Equatorial Guinea to suspend all further deportations, transfers and removals of third-country deportees, overhaul inhumane detention conditions, and award financial compensation to the migrants who have already been forcibly sent to their countries of origin.
The litigation is being advanced by a coalition of human rights organizations led by the Global Strategic Litigation Council (GSLC), acting on behalf of 14 African migrants who were deported from the United States to Equatorial Guinea between November 2025 and April 2026. Rights advocates frame the proceeding as a landmark test case for migrant rights across the continent, even though the ACHPR’s rulings are not legally binding. The commission has the authority to issue urgent measures and refer contested cases to the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights, and advocates say the case could build critical pressure on African governments that have accepted U.S. third-country deportations under opaque bilateral agreements.
Beatrice Njeri, GSLC’s regional litigator for Africa, noted this is the first regional case involving migrants who held formal U.S. legal protection from removal yet were still routed through third countries to persecution zones. It follows a similar ACHPR ruling earlier this year that allowed a challenge to the unlawful prolonged detention of third-country deportees in Eswatini to proceed. One month after that ACHPR order, Eswatini’s Supreme Court ruled that four detained deportees could finally access in-person legal counsel after being denied access for nine months in a maximum-security facility.
The case grows out of a controversial U.S. immigration policy implemented during the Trump administration: under a series of largely unpublicized bilateral deals, the administration deported thousands of asylum seekers and migrants to nearly 24 countries that are not their nations of origin, as part of a broad crackdown on unauthorized immigration. Immigration attorneys have long labeled this third-country deportation strategy a deliberate legal loophole designed to indirectly force protected asylum seekers back to the countries they fled, in violation of international refugee law. Equatorial Guinea is one of at least eight African nations that have signed such third-country deportation agreements with Washington.
Just last week, Equatorial Guinean authorities transferred six of the U.S.-deported migrants onward to their home countries in East Africa, a move legal teams describe as “chain refoulement” — the indirect return of protected people to persecution zones, even after U.S. immigration judges barred their removal under federal law. Attorneys confirm the migrants face widespread persecution in their home countries on the basis of political affiliation, religious belief, ethnic identity and sexual orientation. Many had previously faced arrest, detention, torture and sexual violence at the hands of state security forces in their countries of origin before fleeing.
In the aftermath of last week’s transfers, two of the six deportees have already fled again to neighboring countries and gone into hiding. A third has not been contacted since his forced return, leaving legal teams deeply concerned for his safety and well-being. The remaining three were turned away by their home country, which refused entry because it received no advance notification of their arrival and the migrants lacked valid travel documentation. Stranded, they were sent back to Equatorial Guinea, where they remain trapped in legal limbo.
“They have effectively been rendered stateless,” said Bella Mosselmans, GSLC’s director, describing the entire process as a “cycle of hell” for vulnerable migrants.
The controversial deportation arrangement between the U.S. and Equatorial Guinea stems from an opaque $7.5 million bilateral deal that has brought at least 32 U.S.-deported migrants to the Central African nation to date. U.S. Senator Jeanne Shaheen, the top Democratic member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has publicly labeled Equatorial Guinea’s government “one of the most corrupt governments in the world.”
The Associated Press has previously investigated the conditions facing deportees in Equatorial Guinea, gaining exclusive access to a repurposed hotel that the government of long-ruling President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo has converted into an open-air prison for U.S.-deported asylum seekers. While Equatorial Guinea ranks among Africa’s wealthiest countries per capita due to its vast offshore oil reserves, it remains plagued by systemic corruption and widespread human rights abuses, according to senior U.S. officials and global human rights monitors.
Critical opposition is effectively banned in the country, and the government has repeatedly been accused by rights groups and the U.S. State Department of arbitrary detention, torture and extrajudicial killing of political dissidents and opposition voices. Despite these long-documented concerns, Equatorial Guinea remains a key U.S. partner in Central Africa: U.S. energy companies are the country’s largest foreign investors, and the U.S. government provides funding and training for Equatorial Guinea’s military forces.