Abuja (AFP) – Lawyers have filed a suit against Ghana at west Africa’s top human rights court on behalf of deportees sent to the country under the United States’ immigration crackdown, the legal team said Tuesday. The complaint is the latest legal challenge in an African court against US President Donald Trump’s sweeping immigration clampdown under which he has deported people with legal protections. In cases where Washington is barred from sending people home — after US judges found they likely face torture or persecution, for example — it has sent deportees to “third countries” such as Ghana. Ghana has then sent them home — or, as AFP has reported, dumped them in neighboring Togo without documents.
“No person should be returned to a place where they face persecution, torture or serious threats to their dignity and safety,” said Oliver Barker-Vormawor, senior partner at Ghanaian law firm Merton & Everett LLP. The firm, along with Cornell Law School Transnational Disputes Clinic, in the United States, and the Global Strategic Litigation Council, a coalition of NGOs, filed the lawsuit Monday at the ECOWAS Community Court of Justice in Abuja. The court is the top judicial body for the Economic Community of West African States, a regional bloc of 12 countries.
The lawsuit alleges Ghana is violating domestic and regional law by “facilitating removals to unsafe countries,” a statement from the legal coalition said. Along the way, some deportees have been beaten by US immigration agents and detained in unsanitary facilities in Ghana, according to those AFP has spoken to over the past year. At least 60 people have been deported to Ghana since September, according to the lawyers, with 27 represented in the lawsuit. Beyond saying that it would only take west Africans, Accra has not revealed the terms of the agreement. But shortly after it came into effect, the United States reversed visa curbs it had placed on Ghana.
The lawsuit asks the court to order Ghana to both disclose the terms of the deportation agreement and terminate it. AFP has reached out to the Ghanaian government for comment. A similar lawsuit was filed earlier in June at the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights to halt US deportations to Equatorial Guinea, which has also served as a way station for African deportees. Those in the ECOWAS lawsuit “had sought, and the majority had obtained asylum or other legal protections in the United States,” the legal coalition said. Under Trump, Washington has argued that the law only prevents the United States from sending such people directly to their home countries. None of the 27 deportees in the lawsuit remain in Ghana, the lawyers said. “Many now remain in hiding in their home countries or have fled to third countries where they wait in limbo.”
© 2024 AFP
