ACCRA, Ghana — A transnational coalition of human rights attorneys and advocacy organizations has launched a landmark legal challenge against the government of Ghana, alleging that West African nation has systematically violated the fundamental human rights of asylum seekers by facilitating their forced deportation from the United States back to the conflict-ridden origin nations these people fled. The filing on Tuesday marks the newest high-profile legal action targeting an African government that entered into a controversial third-country deportation agreement with the former Trump administration, which allowed the U.S. to offload non-citizen deportees to nations that are not their countries of birth or citizenship. The lawsuit was submitted to the ECOWAS Community Court of Justice, the regional judicial body for the Economic Community of West African States, and counts the Global Strategic Litigation Council — a broad network of legal practitioners and human rights advocates — among the core members of the coalition bringing the claim. This case marks the first ever legal action brought under a landmark 1979 regional human rights treaty that enshrines protections for free movement across West African borders. The legal challenge represents 27 of the at least 60 people the U.S. has deported to Ghana under the bilateral agreement that took effect in September 2025. According to an official statement released by the rights coalition, Ghana committed to accept these deportees, detain them upon arrival, and coordinate their onward transfer to their home nations — even though the vast majority of these asylum seekers had already received formal protection orders from U.S. immigration judges that barred their deportation to their origin countries due to credible fears of persecution. Most of the 27 named claimants were transferred onward from Ghana to their home nations within mere hours or days of landing, the Tuesday statement confirms, despite the asylum seekers explicitly notifying Ghanaian authorities of their valid U.S. court-ordered protections. Multiple claimants reported being kept in shackles for the entirety of their flight from the U.S. to Ghana. Upon arrival, they say they were held under constant armed guard in a range of facilities, including military camps, unregulated hotels, and airport holding cells, most in unsanitary, overcrowded, and dangerous conditions. The coalition’s core legal argument centers on Ghana’s deliberate violation of the international legal principle of non-refoulement, a binding global norm that prohibits nations from transferring people to territories where they face a proven risk of persecution, torture, or death. A Ghanaian government spokesperson did not issue an immediate response to requests for comment on the lawsuit from reporters. Ghana is not an outlier in these arrangements: it is one of at least nine African nations that have signed third-country deportation pacts with the U.S. Immigration rights advocates estimate that, under these largely untransparent agreements, the Trump administration deported thousands of asylum seekers and migrants to nearly two dozen third-party countries that are not the migrants’ nations of origin, as part of a broader hardline crackdown on unauthorized immigration. Immigration attorneys widely frame these third-country deportation deals as a deliberate legal loophole, designed to allow the U.S. government to bypass domestic asylum protections and indirectly force vulnerable asylum seekers back to the dangerous origin countries they fled. Medical assessments included as evidence in the new lawsuit document significant harm to the claimants: multiple of the 27 people named in the suit showed clinical signs of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and severe major depression linked to their ordeal. The legal team is asking the regional ECOWAS court to issue a number of remedies, including an immediate injunction halting all further onward transfers of deportees held under the agreement, an order compelling Ghana to publicly release the full, unredacted terms of the U.S. deportation deal, financial compensation for the harm inflicted on claimants, and a formal ruling barring Ghana from entering into any similar future agreements. The lawsuit against Ghana follows closely on the heels of another legal challenge brought earlier this month by rights attorneys against Equatorial Guinea, another African nation that signed an identical third-country deportation deal with the U.S. That case was filed before the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights, Africa’s top regional human rights body, and leveles the same core accusation: that Equatorial Guinea violated international human rights law by facilitating the forced deportation of U.S.-expelled asylum seekers back to their high-risk home nations. This report was contributed by Sophie Banchereau, reporting from Dakar, Senegal.