The United States is not the only state to have sought to send people it will not return home to a third country instead. The United Kingdom and Australia have both done so, both have had the arrangements tested in their highest courts, and in both the legislature responded to the court. Their experience bears on the United States programme in two ways: as a comparison of what courts have found when they examined a receiving state’s conditions, and as a warning about what follows when a court’s finding is overridden by statute.
United Kingdom: Rwanda
In November 2023 the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom held that the government’s policy of removing asylum seekers to Rwanda was unlawful. The court found, as reported, that there were substantial grounds for believing that persons removed to Rwanda would face a real risk of refoulement from Rwanda to their countries of origin.1 The finding did not rest on a conclusion that Rwanda would itself mistreat them; it rested on what Rwanda would foreseeably do with them next. That is the same structure as the question this project asks about every receiving state.
Parliament responded with the Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Act 2024. As reported, the Act declared Rwanda to be a safe country, contrary to the court’s findings; provided that a court or tribunal must not consider a claim that Rwanda is not safe; permitted courts to consider evidence relating only to a person’s particular individual circumstances; and disapplied parts of the Human Rights Act.2 The Act was challenged. In SM and Asylum Aid v. Home Secretary, the claimants argued that the provision on individual circumstances does not prevent a decision-maker from considering whether there is a real risk that a person removed to Rwanda would be sent onward to an unsafe third country.3 That is, in terms, the chain refoulement question, litigated under a statute designed to close it.
In June 2025 the United States concluded a memorandum of understanding with Rwanda and began transferring people there in August 2025.4 Whatever the differences between the two schemes, a court of final appeal in a comparable legal system examined this destination and reached a conclusion about onward refoulement from it. That is a fact a reader considering a transfer to Rwanda should have.
Australia: indefinite detention and the third country
In November 2023 the High Court of Australia held unanimously in NZYQ v. Minister for Immigration that indefinite immigration detention is unconstitutional, because detention that cannot end in removal is punitive and punishment may be ordered only by a court. The period of permissible executive detention ends, the court held, when there is no real prospect of removal becoming practicable in the reasonably foreseeable future.5 The decision overturned a precedent that had stood for nearly twenty years, and it states in Australian constitutional terms the principle that Zadvydas states in United States statutory terms.
Parliament’s first response, legislation imposing strict conditions on the people released, was itself struck down by the High Court as punitive, as reported. In November 2024 Parliament passed laws permitting the government to deport people to third countries that are not their countries of origin.6 Australia therefore now has a third-country removal regime of its own, enacted as the response to a court’s finding that people who cannot be removed cannot be held indefinitely. Whether that regime has been tested in the High Court is not yet confirmed in the sources available to the Coalition.
Australia’s earlier offshore processing arrangements, on Nauru and on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea, are the best-known third-country schemes of the past two decades. The Coalition has not yet verified the decisions of the High Court of Australia and the Supreme Court of Papua New Guinea concerning those arrangements to the standard this project requires, and will add them when it has.
The treaty body: Turhan v. Sweden
The Committee against Torture’s decision of November 2024 in Turhan v. Sweden is described under The Law. It is the most direct international authority for the proposition that a transfer to a country which will foreseeably send the person onward violates Article 3, and it was decided on facts in which the intermediate country, Kosovo, was not itself characterised as a place of torture.7 Kosovo is among the states to which the United States has since transferred people.
The European Court of Human Rights
The European Court of Human Rights has a substantial body of decisions on transfer to a third country and on the responsibility of the sending state for what follows. The Coalition has not yet verified those decisions to the standard this project requires and does not summarise them here. They will be added when they have been read.
This page describes the law and the public record. It is not legal advice, and it is not a substitute for a lawyer. The Coalition does not represent individuals. Organisations that do are listed under Where to Find Help.
References
- R (AAA (Syria) and others) v. Secretary of State for the Home Department [2023] UKSC 42 (15 November 2023). Judgment at BAILII.
- Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Act 2024, as described in Institute for Government, explainer and Kingsley Napley, analysis.
- SM and Asylum Aid v. Home Secretary. Judgment, Courts and Tribunals Judiciary.
- See The Countries, Rwanda.
- NZYQ v. Minister for Immigration, Citizenship and Multicultural Affairs [2023] HCA 37 (28 November 2023). Judgment at AustLII.
- As described at Asylum Insight, NZYQ; see also International Journal of Refugee Law.
- Committee against Torture, Turhan v. Sweden, CAT/C/81/D/1109/2021 (8 November 2024). UN Digital Library.