Central African Republic

What has happened

Human Rights Watch reported that the eighteen people flown to Bangui in June 2026 were “all of whom had US court-ordered protections against deportation to their countries of origin due to fears of persecution or torture.”

They were sent to a country the Committee against Torture has never examined, which has no National Preventive Mechanism, and against which no individual may bring a complaint. The absence of adverse torture findings about the Central African Republic is a function of the machinery never having been engaged.

Human Rights Watch on the June flight.

“On June 12, the Central African Republic accepted 18 men and women of other nationalities deported from the United States,” including “people from Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Turkey, Armenia, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Cameroon, Egypt, and Tunisia,” all of whom held United States court-ordered protections. Six of the eighteen were women.

Human Rights Watch, 29 June 2026. Use this nationality list. One tracker reproduces it and cites HRW; another gives an incompatible list adding Uzbekistan, Syria and Tajikistan which nothing corroborates. CBS News, reporting the same flight on 13 June, independently names Armenia and Iraq, which appear on HRW’s list and not the other. The number is 18 on three sources; Amnesty gives 17 and CBS “about 20.”

The July flight, and why the number was never really in dispute.

A multi-stop flight carrying roughly 71 people left the United States on 30 July 2026, put off ten in Sierra Leone and thirty in Ghana, and “Everyone else was forced off the plane in the Central African Republic.” Seventy-one less forty is thirty-one, which is exactly what one tracker recorded. The apparent conflict between the trackers was one of them not yet having confirmed the flight.

The American Prospect, 31 August 2026. Arrival in Bangui is reported by one outlet as 1 August; departure, transit and arrival dates differ across time zones and stops.

A third flight, in August, which neither tracker records.

At least three Nicaraguan nationals arrived in Bangui on 29 August 2026, one of them named, reported held in police custody without a passport. This corresponds to CBS News’s report of three ICE flights over ten days, the last of which put people off in Sierra Leone and the Central African Republic. CBS separately reported an Afghan man, identified only as Khalil, deported to the Central African Republic despite having won protection in United States immigration court.

What has happened to them.

The June group was detained for two weeks without access to medication; several were hospitalised with malaria; fifteen of the eighteen remained in the country in late July. Human Rights Watch called on the authorities to ensure “reception conditions respect their dignity, privacy, and access to basic necessities, including menstrual hygiene supplies.” Four Cubans from the July group were housed at a hotel in Bangui with roughly thirty-six others, could not freely leave, held no identity documents, and have asked members of Congress to help them return to the United States.

No confirmed case either way on onward removal. No source reports that anyone transferred to the Central African Republic has been returned to their country of origin, and none reports resettlement or return to the United States. The site should say so plainly.

What the record says about Central African Republic itself

The Committee against Torture has never examined this state.

The Central African Republic acceded to the Convention against Torture on 11 October 2016. Its initial report was due in 2017 and was received on 14 March 2025, roughly eight years late. No concluding observations exist. No list of issues exists. It has made no declaration under article 22, so no individual may complain to the Committee. It acceded to the Optional Protocol on the same day in 2016 and has never established a National Preventive Mechanism.

On torture, then: no treaty-body findings, no individual complaints mechanism, and no national detention-monitoring body. An opponent will present that silence as exculpatory, and the site should pre-empt it.

A different UN committee did examine the exact question, eleven months before the assurance was given.

The Committee on Enforced Disappearances, CED/C/CAF/CO/1, 29 April 2025, “regrets the lack of detailed information on legal safeguards against the risk of being subjected to enforced disappearance as a result of refoulement,” on the criteria used to assess that risk, on the conditions under which the state “accepts diplomatic assurances when there are substantial grounds for believing that the person concerned would be in danger,” and on whether any appeal against expulsion has suspensive effect. It recommended “systematic and strict respect for the principle of non-refoulement,” including individual assessment “including in countries considered safe,” and that “diplomatic assurances are effectively assessed with utmost care.”

Eleven months later the Central African Republic gave the United States a written assurance about onward transfer.

The same Committee noted that secret detention “is not expressly prohibited under domestic law” and that detention registers “are not always kept up to date in practice.”

The United Nations has documented the detention system these people entered.

A joint UN Human Rights Office and MINUSCA report of 18 July 2024 found thousands held in overcrowded detention with limited access to food, water, sanitation and healthcare; a documented pattern of illegal and arbitrary arrest by army and security forces affecting more than 1,500 people in 2023; 1,749 detainees awaiting trial at the end of 2023, some for nearly six years; and malnutrition and poor hygiene producing disease outbreaks in prisons.

Set that against the June group: two weeks’ detention without medication, several hospitalised with malaria.

Amnesty International’s findings on the country.

Amnesty’s 2026 annual report records that “In April government forces and allied units reportedly arrested and tortured civilians, and burned around 20 houses during operations against the Anti-Balaka armed group,” that “Prisons remained severely overcrowded,” and that MINUSCA logged 295 conflict-related sexual violence incidents in eight months, with government forces the second most frequently alleged perpetrators.

Amnesty International, POL 10/0320/2026, April 2026.

There is no court outside this country that you can file in

The Coalition states this plainly because the alternative is to leave someone searching for a door that is not there.

The Central African Republic has never ratified the Protocol establishing the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights. It signed it on 4 March 2002 and stopped there. The Court therefore has no jurisdiction over it by any route at all, not even through a referral by the African Commission.

It is a member of the Economic Community of Central African States, whose treaty provides for a Community Court of Justice. That court does not function. As at March 2024, the member states meeting in Malabo had given only an agreement in principle for it to be seated in Kinshasa, its constituent texts were still to be finalised, and the ministers had agreed that its competences would be determined principally in criminal matters. The Coalition could find no judges appointed, no seat established, no rules of procedure and no judgment.

The Central African Republic is also a member of the Central African Economic and Monetary Community, whose Court of Justice at N’Djamena is real and does hear applications from individuals who show a certain and legitimate interest. But its jurisdiction is confined to community law, the legality of community acts, community liability and staff disputes. It is not a human rights court and it is not a route out of detention.

What is left.

A communication to the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights under article 55 of the African Charter. Three things should be understood about it before anyone relies on it. The Commission is not a court and its findings are recommendations. Article 56(5) requires local remedies to be exhausted first, unless that procedure is unduly prolonged. And it is slow, measured in years rather than months.

Compare that with the position in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Cabo Verde, where the ECOWAS Court takes individual applications directly with no exhaustion requirement, or Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where the East African Court of Justice does the same within two months of detention. A person transferred to the Central African Republic has neither.

African Union depositary list for the Protocol establishing the African Court, status date 14 February 2023. Economic Community of Central African States, institutional pages, and reporting of the March 2024 ministerial meeting in Malabo. Convention governing the Court of Justice of the Central African Economic and Monetary Community, article 14. African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights, articles 55 and 56. Checked 8 September 2026.

The dated record

Every entry below is a fact with a source.

What is not established

The Coalition publishes what it can source and says plainly what it cannot. The following is open on this page.

How many were on the August flight and who they were. Whether anyone has been returned home. Whether the Independent Expert on the human rights situation in the Central African Republic has addressed these transfers, which is a promising line given the mandate exists. The number on the June flight, on which sources give 17, 18 and about 20. And a running total of people currently in the country, which could not be reconciled and should not be published.

What this page does not yet carry

The country pages for Ghana and Eswatini carry a practical layer as well as an evidentiary one: what happens in the first days after arrival, who is reachable inside the country, which complaint routes are open, and what has been asked of the government. That research has not been completed for Central African Republic. This page does not guess at it. The sections will be added, and this note removed, when they are sourced.

If you hold information that belongs in those sections, whether you are a lawyer, a relative, a journalist or someone who has been through this, the Coalition wants it.