A country guide answers one question: what does a person actually find in the country they were sent to? Not what the law says should happen there, and not what the receiving government has said about the arrangement, but what is documented about the place itself. Whether transfers to it have been established. Whether people sent there have been detained on arrival. Whether anyone has been removed onward from it to somewhere else. Who can be reached inside the country by a person who arrives with no lawyer, no money, and no standing to be there.
These guides sit in their own project because they answer to a different reader than the rest of the record does. A decision in the register is read by a lawyer building an argument. A country guide is read by someone who has landed, or by the family and the advocate trying to reach them, and it is read in a hurry. It is written accordingly: short sections, plain sentences, and the practical thing first.
How a guide is built
Each guide is assembled from named sources and every one of them is linked, so a reader can go to the original and check it. Court filings and judgments are cited to the court. Reporting is cited to the outlet that published it. Country conditions material is cited to the body that produced it, whether that is a United Nations mechanism, a national human rights institution, or an organization working in the country. Where two sources disagree, the disagreement is shown rather than resolved in favor of whichever is more convenient.
Where something is not known, the guide says so. A guide will state that a number could not be confirmed, or that no organization providing legal help in that country could be identified, rather than leaving a reader to assume that silence means nothing is there. An absent fact is marked as absent.
What the two labels on each card mean
Transfers reported means that removals from the United States to that country have been documented by a source the guide names. Transfers not established means that the Coalition has not found such a source, which is not the same as a finding that no transfers have occurred. Onward return reported means there is a documented instance of a person being moved on from that country to a third destination, which is the risk that most often defeats the premise on which a transfer was arranged in the first place.
What these guides are not
Nothing here is legal advice, and no guide can tell a particular person what to do in a particular case. Immigration and asylum law differ in every country named here, the facts of one case rarely transfer to another, and the consequences of a wrong step fall on the person, not on the writer. Every guide points to the people in that country who can advise, and to the international mechanisms that accept complaints. The purpose of the guide is to make it possible to find them.
Where the law is
A guide describes a place. It does not set out the law that governs whether a person may be sent there, because that law is the same wherever the plane lands and it belongs in one place rather than repeated in twenty. The decisions register, organized by question, holds what the courts have said, including the decisions on third-country designation and the decisions on notice before removal. The diplomatic assurances project covers the promises receiving governments give about how transferred people will be treated, and why those promises are contested.
The list below is incomplete, and it is meant to be. Guides are added as the sources support them, one country at a time. If you know of a country that belongs here, or you can correct something in a guide that is already published, the Coalition wants to hear it.