Where the Prohibition Is Being Broken

Why this page is here. This section holds the states whose own conduct breaches the prohibition, judged by the same standard the Coalition applies everywhere. The United States is here because it sends people, and because the risk described on every country guide on this site begins with a decision taken here. The other states in this section have no part in that programme and appear for conduct of their own. What a receiving state agrees to.

What has happened

Since January 2025 the United States has removed people to countries that are not their own, under arrangements with more than thirty governments, most of which have never been published. Monitoring organisations describe more than 23,000 transfers and more than $49 million in United States funding connected to the arrangements.

What the courts have said about the purpose.

Three federal courts have addressed whether these removals are punitive. On 21 August 2025 a court took judicial notice of official public statements and held that they “do offer evidence that third country deportation is occurring as a punishment.” On 17 November 2025 a court held that the practice of third-country removal paired with imprisonment “is intended to be punitive and thus violates due process,” and recorded that the government had not addressed the merits of the claim, leaving the court “with no argument from respondents to consider on this topic.” On 21 November 2025 a court enjoined a removal carried out “pursuant to Respondents’ unconstitutionally punitive third-country removal program.”

A fourth court, reviewing a removal to Ghana, found the conduct “part of a pattern and widespread effort to evade the government’s legal obligations by doing indirectly what it cannot do directly.”

The authority that runs the other way. All three of those decisions are district court orders. Higher courts have held repeatedly that removal is a civil matter and not punishment, and that an incidental deterrent effect does not change that. The Supreme Court has said that removal is “a civil, not criminal, matter,” and courts of appeals have held that the Eighth Amendment does not reach deportation. What the three orders record is narrower and more recent: that on the facts before them, where removal was paired with imprisonment and officials had stated a purpose of deterring others, the measure was punitive. The Coalition reports the disagreement and does not resolve it.

The Coalition reports what these courts decided and does not offer any reading of United States law. Every order is linked below and should be read rather than relied on through this summary.

What the United States has accepted, and what it declined

This section is about the Convention against Torture, and it is the part of this page that will surprise most readers.

The United States signed the Convention on 18 April 1988 and ratified it on 21 October 1994. It enacted its protections in domestic law. It has objected, in the depositary record, to other states’ reservations to the very articles at issue here: in 2011 it objected to Pakistan’s reservations to articles 3, 4, 6, 12, 13 and 16, stating that the combination of those reservations was “incompatible with the object and purpose” of the Convention. Article 3 is the non-refoulement article.

On the two declarations that decide whether anyone can complain, the record reads as follows. The United States declared, under article 21, that it recognises the competence of the Committee to consider complaints brought by one state against another, and added that it understands such communications will be accepted “only if they come from a State Party which has made a similar declaration.”

It has never made the declaration under article 22. Article 22 is the one that allows an individual, or someone acting for them, to complain to the Committee. Without it the Committee has no competence to receive a complaint from a person in the United States at all.

The United States is also not a party to the first Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, so the Human Rights Committee is closed to an individual as well. It is not a party to the Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture, so there are no preventive visits and no national mechanism is owed.

The Coalition sets this out without comment beyond one observation, which is a matter of record rather than of opinion. This is the same position as Uganda’s. Uganda made the article 21 declaration on 19 December 2001 and never made the article 22 declaration, and this site says of Uganda that the state-to-state procedure “gives a detained person nothing.” The sentence is equally true here.

United Nations Treaty Collection, chapters IV-9, IV-9-b and IV-5, the depositary’s own record rather than a secondary table. Checked 9 September 2026 and linked below.

What United Nations bodies have said

The Coalition is precise about what exists here, because the record is often described loosely.

There is no recent United Nations finding about these removals. The Committee against Torture last reported on the United States in 2014. The United States is not in default: it filed its sixth periodic report in 2022 and the Committee has never scheduled the review. The delay is the Committee’s, and the funding crisis has made it worse.

The most recent finding is from the Human Rights Committee, on 30 October 2023, which recorded that the removal measures “compromise the quality of the assessment of individual protection needs and increase the risk of breaches of the principle of non-refoulement,” and recommended withdrawing measures that increase the risk of refoulement.

What exists from 2025 and 2026 is a different kind of record, and it is uncontested. United Nations special procedures have sent the United States fifty-nine communications since 1 January 2025. The United States has replied to none of them. Among them are an urgent appeal of 23 April 2025 signed by twelve mandate holders; one of 6 August 2025 stating that the removals appear to contravene “the obligations of non-refoulement (including the prohibition on ‘chain refoulement’)”; and one of 19 January 2026 stating that the obligation “is absolute and without exception.”

A communication is an allegation put to a state, not a finding against it, and this site never calls one a finding. What can be said is that the allegations were made by the United Nations mechanisms established for the purpose, and that the United States has neither answered nor denied them.

On 7 November 2025 the United States did not appear for its own Universal Periodic Review and filed no national report.

What is not established

That any United Nations body has found the United States responsible for refoulement. None has, and nothing on this page should be read as saying otherwise. That the treatment of people held pending third-country removal amounts to torture as United States law defines it; that question turns on a requirement of specific intent that no public record yet meets. The full texts of the arrangements with most of the thirty-five states. The number of people removed who held protection ordered by a court, which the government has been asked for and has not provided.

The Coalition writes Investigating rather than none found, because the second phrase reads as though a question has been answered when it has only been asked.

What this page does not yet carry

A section naming the organisations inside the United States that act for people facing removal to a third country, with verified contact details. The Coalition is compiling it and would rather publish nothing than publish a number that does not answer. In the meantime this project’s own page of organisations is the best available starting point: Where to Find Help.

The date and setting of the President’s statement quoted above. It is quoted here as reproduced and judicially noticed by a federal court, and the Coalition has not located the original recording. If you can supply it, the Coalition wants it.

If you can correct anything on this page, the Coalition wants to hear it.

Sources

Every source relied on above, linked so it can be read in full rather than through this summary.

Federal court records. Kurdobadze v. Venegas, No. 1:25-cv-00157 (S.D. Tex.), the order of 6 May 2026 and the order of 5 June 2026 granting the writ. D.V.D. v. U.S. Department of Homeland Security, No. 1:25-cv-10676-BEM (D. Mass.), order of 18 April 2025. Nguyen v. Scott, No. 2:25-cv-01398-TMC (W.D. Wash.), order of 21 August 2025. Abubaka v. Bondi, No. 2:25-cv-01889-RSL (W.D. Wash.), order of 17 November 2025. Hambarsonpour v. Bondi, No. 2:25-cv-01802-RSM (W.D. Wash.), order of 21 November 2025. D.A. v. Noem, No. 1:25-cv-03135-TSC (D.D.C.), memorandum opinion of 15 September 2025.

Treaty status, from the depositary. Convention against Torture, for the ratification of 21 October 1994, the article 21 declaration, the absence of any article 22 declaration, and the 2011 objection to Pakistan’s reservations. Optional Protocol to the Convention. First Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, in which the United States does not appear.

United Nations bodies. Human Rights Committee, concluding observations on the United States, CCPR/C/USA/CO/5, 30 October 2023. Special procedures communications database. United Nations experts, 8 July 2025, on diplomatic assurances. The High Commissioner for Human Rights, 13 May 2025.

United States Senate. Committee on Foreign Relations, minority staff report, At What Cost, February 2026.

Compiled 9 September 2026. Where this page summarises a decision or a report, the full document is linked above and should be read rather than relied on through the summary.

Why this page is here. Italy has no part in the United States removal programme, and nothing on this page concerns it. Italy is here because of its own conduct, judged by the same standard the Coalition applies everywhere: what a state has done, what a court or a treaty body has found about it, and whether a person harmed by it has anywhere to go. The Coalition holds every state to that standard, including the states that write the reports about other states.

What has happened

For more than fifteen years Italy has moved the decisive moment of its border control further and further from a courtroom. In 2009 Italian military ships took people off boats in international waters and carried them back to Libya. The European Court of Human Rights held that unlawful in 2012. Since then the pattern has been to arrange for the same outcome without Italian hands on the person: a Libyan coastguard that Italy funds, trains and coordinates; commercial captains asked to hand people back; readmissions at the Slovenian land border and at Adriatic ports carried out informally; and, since 2023, two centres on Albanian territory where Italy detains people it intercepted at sea.

What the Committee against Torture said, and what it is

On 28 April 2026 the Committee against Torture adopted its concluding observations on Italy’s seventh periodic report, symbol CAT/C/ITA/CO/7, issued on 11 June 2026. Concluding observations are the Committee’s observations and recommendations under article 19 of the Convention. They are not a finding that Italy violated the Convention in any particular case, and this page does not describe them as one. What gives them their weight here is what they ask and how plainly they ask it.

The Committee wrote that “the practical implementation of the principle of non-refoulement in the State Party appears increasingly undermined by policies that link migration management to security and that prioritize deterrence and forced returns”. It then recommended that Italy “immediately cease the practice of pushbacks”. That is the operative sentence, and there is no qualification on it.

On Libya, the Committee recorded “the substantial risk of torture and ill-treatment faced by migrants who are forcibly returned to Libya by the Libyan coastguard”, and its concern that the 2017 Memorandum “continues to be implemented”. Its recommendation was to review the Memorandum in order to ensure full compliance with the Convention, not to end it. The Coalition reports the recommendation the Committee actually made.

On the detention centres inside Italy, the Committee expressed “serious concern regarding allegations of excessive use of force and ill-treatment by special law-enforcement intervention groups, dilapidated and overly carceral conditions, and an almost complete lack of meaningful activities for detainees in pre-removal detention centres”. It recorded that people leaving prison may be held alongside people with no criminal history, that avoiding detention may require a bond of between 2,500 and 5,000 euros, and that Decree-Law No. 124 of 2023 extended the maximum period of immigration detention to eighteen months, reversing a reduction made in 2020.

The people Italy detains outside Italy

The Albania protocol is the part of this record the Coalition considers most serious, because it is the part that puts a detained person out of reach while insisting he is not.

Article 4 of the protocol provides, in Italy’s own treaty text, that disputes between the authorities and the people held in those centres are submitted exclusively to Italian jurisdiction. Italy told United Nations special procedures in August 2024 that “the regulations regarding the duration of administrative retention and the conditions for the lawful adoption of such measure are identical to the national ones”, and that “the assessment of non-refoulement is an integral part of the motivational part of the measure”. On Italy’s account, nothing changes except the location.

The Committee against Torture did not accept that the location changes nothing. It asked Italy to “ensure legal clarity” on how articles 12, 13, 14 and 22 of the Convention operate for a person Italy is detaining abroad, and to refrain from transferring people before individualised vulnerability screening with the detainee’s participation. Those are questions about whether a remedy exists, not about whether a rule exists. Italy has recognised the right of individual complaint to the Committee since 10 October 1989. The Committee is asking what happens when the person making that complaint is held on another state’s territory, across the Adriatic, under a procedure run at speed.

Italian courts have already found one practical consequence. On 18 October 2024 the Tribunal of Rome declined to validate the detention of a man held at Gjader. Its whole disposition reads “non convalida il trattenimento”, it does not validate the detention. The court reasoned that under the protocol’s own terms a person whose detention is not validated can regain his liberty only through the Italian authorities and outside Albanian territory, so that in the absence of any legally admissible alternative he has the right to be brought to Italy. The court did not strike down the protocol, did not find refoulement, and did not rule on torture, and this page does not suggest otherwise.

The Court of Justice of the European Union gave judgment on 1 August 2025 in the joined cases of Alace and Canpelli, which arose out of two men taken to the Gjader centre. That judgment is about whether a member state may designate safe countries of origin by legislative act and how such a designation may be reviewed. It is not a ruling on the Albania protocol, on detention, or on refoulement, and the Coalition does not present it as one.

What the European Court of Human Rights has decided, in both directions

Four decisions matter, and two of them run against the Coalition’s reading. All four are set out here, because a page that carried only the helpful ones would not be worth reading.

Hirsi Jamaa and Others v. Italy, Grand Chamber, 23 February 2012. Italian military ships intercepted people in international waters and carried them to Tripoli. The Court held unanimously that the people were within Italy’s jurisdiction, that “Italy cannot circumvent its ‘jurisdiction’ under the Convention by describing the events in issue as rescue operations on the high seas”, and that by transferring them “the Italian authorities, in full knowledge of the facts, exposed them to treatment proscribed by the Convention”. It found a second violation of article 3 for the risk of onward return from Libya to Somalia and Eritrea, holding that “indirect refoulement of an alien leaves the responsibility of the Contracting State intact”, and a violation of the prohibition on collective expulsion.

Sharifi and Others v. Italy and Greece, 21 October 2014. Four Afghan applicants were turned round at the port of Ancona. The Court found that the measures taken against them “amount to collective and indiscriminate expulsions”, and found a violation of article 3 by Italy because in returning them to Greece the Italian authorities exposed them to the risks arising from the failures of the Greek asylum procedure. The risk of expulsion onward to Afghanistan grounded the finding against Greece, not against Italy, and this page keeps that distinction. The judgment was delivered in French and is quoted here in French with a translation marked as such. Thirty-one of the thirty-five applicants had already been struck out.

Khlaifia and Others v. Italy, Grand Chamber, 15 December 2016. This one runs against us. The Grand Chamber reversed the Chamber and held unanimously that there had been no violation of article 3 in the conditions at the Contrada Imbriacola centre or on the ships Vincent and Audace, and by sixteen votes to one that there had been no collective expulsion. Khlaifia is the leading authority that a summary, standardised return under a bilateral readmission agreement is not automatically a collective expulsion where each person had a real opportunity to raise his own situation. Italy did lose on the lawfulness of the detention and on the absence of an effective remedy for the conditions complaint. Anyone assessing the pushback allegations recorded by the Committee will have to work through Khlaifia first.

S.S. and Others v. Italy, 20 May 2025. This one runs against us harder. It arose from an incident on 6 November 2017 in which a Libyan coastguard vessel intervened alongside a rescue ship, people died, and survivors were taken back to Libya. The Court declared the application inadmissible, holding that “the applicants were not under the jurisdiction of Italy within the meaning of Article 1 of the Convention”. That is the hinge of everything Italy has built since 2012. Where Italian personnel had people aboard Italian ships, there was jurisdiction. Where Italy funds, equips, trains and coordinates but does not touch, the Court in 2025 found there was not.

The Coalition sets that decision out in full rather than around it, and adds only what the Court itself added. In the same decision the Court said it did “not lose sight” of the fact that the applicants “ran the risk of being sent back to Libya”, that every report before it showed people in Libya at that time were “at risk of torture, slavery and discrimination”, and that the situation there “was no more favourable than it was found to have been in the Hirsi Jamaa and Others case”. It observed that the situation is “nonetheless governed by other rules of international law”, and that “the special nature of the maritime environment cannot justify an area outside the law”. The Committee against Torture is not bound by the European Convention’s test for jurisdiction, and in April 2026 it addressed the same policy directly. That the two bodies reach Italy by different routes, and one of them does not reach it at all, is the point, and it is the reason this page exists.

What Italy said, and what Italy declined

On 7 April 2025 Italy filed its response to the recommendations made at its Universal Periodic Review. Paragraph 32 reads: “Italy ensures full compliance with the principle of non-refoulement, by always carrying out an individual assessment of the risks to which the person would be exposed in the event of removal from the national territory.”

That paragraph appears under the heading Recommendations noted. In the language of the Universal Periodic Review, noted means not accepted. Italy accepted 295 of the 340 recommendations it received. The recommendation that paragraph 32 answers, number 34.330, asked Italy to “ensure that the principle of non-refoulement is upheld for all women and girls in need of international protection and that no asylum-seeker or migrant is expelled from the country without an individual risk assessment”. It is not on the accepted list.

Eight months later, on 10 December 2025, Italy joined twenty-six other Council of Europe member states in a statement to the Conference of Ministers of Justice asserting that the scope of inhuman and degrading treatment under article 3 of the European Convention, “which is an absolute right, should be constrained to the most serious issues in a manner which does not prevent State Parties from taking proportionate decisions on the expulsion of foreign criminals, or in removal or extradition cases”. The Committee against Torture took note of that statement and answered it in a single sentence: Italy “should uphold the absolute nature of the principle of non-refoulement under all circumstances”.

The Coalition records these three documents together because they are the shape of the file. A state that says it is in full compliance, declines the recommendation that would test the claim, and then argues that the prohibition should be read more narrowly, is not describing an oversight.

What runs the other way

The Committee against Torture recorded findings in Italy’s favour in the same document, and they belong here.

It took note of “the positive practice in the State Party of prosecutions of individuals, in particular boat captains, who engage in acts tantamount to refoulement”. It welcomed judgment No. 149 of 28 May 2020, in which the Court of Messina sentenced three people to twenty years’ imprisonment for crimes including torture committed against migrants detained at the Zawiya camp in Libya. It noted judgment No. 30 of the Constitutional Court of 25 February 2025 striking down two-hour daily limits on detainees’ time outdoors. It listed nine legislative reforms and eight policy initiatives that it welcomed, and it thanked Italy for accepting the simplified reporting procedure and for appearing.

Italy has made both of the declarations that decide whether anyone can complain about it. It accepted the article 21 procedure and the article 22 procedure on 10 October 1989, and it ratified the Optional Protocol on 3 April 2013, so its places of detention are open to international inspection and any person subject to its jurisdiction may petition the Committee directly.

The Council of Europe closed its supervision of the Sharifi judgment on 13 June 2024, having satisfied itself that all the measures required had been adopted. Italy will say the Adriatic port practice was remedied, and the Committee of Ministers agreed with it. That resolution is sixteen months older than the Committee against Torture’s record of fresh reports of pushbacks at the same ports.

Italy answered three of the four recent United Nations special procedures communications about its migration policy, within two to four months in each case.

What is not established

That the Committee against Torture identified any particular onward route. It used the term chain refoulement and stopped. It named no onward state, and neither does the Coalition.

That any court has held the Albania protocol unlawful. None has, on anything the Coalition has read. The Tribunal of Rome declined to validate one man’s detention. The Court of Justice ruled on safe-country designation.

That any United Nations body has found Italy responsible for refoulement in an individual case. None has. Italy has accepted the individual complaint procedure since 1989, so such a finding is possible. The Coalition cites none because it has verified none.

Any number. How many people were pushed back at the Slovenian border, returned by the Libyan coastguard, or transferred to Gjader is not established in any document the Coalition has verified, and no figure appears on this page.

What the special procedures allege. Four letters have been sent to Italy since 2024, on the Albania protocol, on voluntary humanitarian return from Libya, on the firing on the Ocean Viking, and on the 2026 immigration bill. A communication is an allegation put to a state, not a finding against it, and this site never calls one a finding. Italy replied to the first three.

What this page does not yet carry

A section naming the organisations in Italy and in Albania that act for people held under the protocol, with contact details that have been checked. That is the section the Coalition considers most useful on any country page, and it is the section that takes longest to verify. It is being built.

The contents of the Court of Cassation judgment No. 4557 of 1 February 2024, cited by the Committee as one of its sources. The Coalition has confirmed the citation but has not read the judgment and will not describe what it held until it has.

The Italian court decisions after August 2025 applying the Court of Justice judgment. They exist; they have not been verified here.

If you can correct anything on this page, the Coalition wants to hear it.

Sources

Every source relied on above, linked so it can be read in full rather than through this summary.

United Nations treaty bodies. Committee against Torture, concluding observations on the seventh periodic report of Italy, CAT/C/ITA/CO/7, adopted 28 April 2026, issued 11 June 2026. Committee against Torture, concluding observations on Slovenia, CAT/C/SVN/CO/4, 7 December 2023, cited by the Committee at footnote 9 of the Italy observations.

Universal Periodic Review. Italy’s views on the recommendations, A/HRC/59/4/Add.1, 7 April 2025, paragraphs 4 and 32. The recommendations themselves, A/HRC/59/4, 18 March 2025, recommendation 34.330. Italy’s national report, A/HRC/WG.6/48/ITA/1, 11 October 2024.

European Court of Human Rights. Hirsi Jamaa and Others v. Italy [GC], no. 27765/09, 23 February 2012. Sharifi and Others v. Italy and Greece, no. 16643/09, 21 October 2014, French text, which is the authentic one. Khlaifia and Others v. Italy [GC], no. 16483/12, 15 December 2016. S.S. and Others v. Italy (decision), no. 21660/18, 20 May 2025. Committee of Ministers, Final Resolution CM/ResDH(2024)97, 13 June 2024, closing Sharifi.

Court of Justice of the European Union. Joined Cases C-758/24 and C-759/24, Alace and Canpelli, Grand Chamber, 1 August 2025.

Italian courts. Tribunal of Rome, eighteenth civil section, decree No. 42251 R.G. 2024, 18 October 2024. Italian first instance orders are not officially published; this copy is hosted by the legal journal Questione Giustizia and carries the court’s letterhead, case number and the judge’s name. The name of the man detained appears in the order and is not reproduced here.

United Nations special procedures. Joint allegation letter AL ITA 3/2024, 24 June 2024, on the Albania protocol, and Italy’s reply of 23 August 2024. AL ITA 4/2025, 30 April 2025, on voluntary humanitarian return from Libya, and Italy’s reply of 18 July 2025. AL ITA 6/2025, 15 October 2025, on the firing on the Ocean Viking. OL ITA 1/2026, 6 July 2026, on Bill No. 1869. All at the special procedures communications database.

Treaty status, from the depositary. United Nations Treaty Collection, chapter IV-9 for the ratification of 12 January 1989 and the article 21 and article 22 declarations of 10 October 1989, and chapter IV-9-b for the ratification of the Optional Protocol on 3 April 2013.

Compiled 10 September 2026. Where this page summarises a decision or a report, the full document is linked above and should be read in preference to this summary. Every quotation was taken from the document itself. Three claims that appeared in the Coalition’s working notes were removed before publication because they could not be verified: an onward route through named states, a date of January 2026 for Italy’s statement to the Human Rights Council, and a characterisation of the Court of Cassation judgment. Corrections to the Coalition.

Why this page is here. The United Kingdom has no part in the United States removal programme, and nothing on this page concerns it. The United Kingdom is here because of its own conduct, judged by the same standard the Coalition applies everywhere: what a state has done, what a court or a treaty body has found about it, and whether a person harmed by it has anywhere to go. The Coalition holds every state to that standard, including the states that write the reports about other states.

What has happened

On 14 April 2022 the United Kingdom published a Memorandum of Understanding with Rwanda under which people who arrived to claim asylum would be sent to Rwanda, and their claims decided there. Three courts considered it. The Divisional Court found it lawful. The Court of Appeal, by a majority, found it unlawful. On 15 November 2023 the Supreme Court, unanimously, agreed with the Court of Appeal: there were substantial grounds for believing that people sent to Rwanda faced a real risk of being returned to the countries they had fled. Within six months Parliament passed an Act declaring Rwanda safe and forbidding every decision-maker and every court to conclude otherwise. Over the two and a half years the scheme existed, four people went to Rwanda voluntarily and nobody was removed there by force. On 2 December 2025 Parliament repealed the Act.

In late July 2025 the United Kingdom signed a separate agreement with France under which people arriving by small boat may be detained on arrival, their asylum claims declared inadmissible, and the person returned to France. On 8 December 2025 nine United Nations special procedures wrote to the United Kingdom about it. As of the date of this page, no reply is recorded.

What the courts found

The Supreme Court’s judgment in R (AAA (Syria) and others) v Secretary of State for the Home Department was given by five justices jointly, with no dissent. The test it applied is the one the Convention against Torture uses, and the Court said so: “whether there are substantial grounds for believing that the removal of asylum seekers to Rwanda would expose them to a real risk of ill treatment, as a consequence of refoulement to another country”.

On the assurances Rwanda had given, the Court held that “the court has to make its own assessment of whether there are substantial grounds for believing that there is a real risk of refoulement. It is not required to accept the government’s evaluation of assurances”. It accepted that “the government of Rwanda entered into the MEDP in good faith”, and said the question was “not the good faith of the government of Rwanda at the political level, but its practical ability to fulfil its assurances”. It found “a culture within Rwanda of, at best, inadequate understanding of Rwanda’s obligations under the Refugee Convention”. And it concluded, at paragraph 105, that “asking ourselves whether there were substantial grounds for believing that a real risk of refoulement existed at the relevant time, we have concluded that there were”. The Secretary of State’s appeal was dismissed.

The Court also said what it was not deciding. It accepted that Rwanda’s capacity “can and will be built up”, dated its finding to “the relevant time”, and declined to rely on customary international law because it had not been addressed on it. It did not hold that sending asylum seekers to a third country is unlawful in itself. The Coalition reports the judgment at its actual width.

Before any of this, on 14 June 2022, the European Court of Human Rights had indicated an interim measure preventing the removal of one man to Rwanda until three weeks after the final domestic decision in his case. It gave as its reasons the concerns of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees that people sent to Rwanda “will not have access to fair and efficient procedures for the determination of refugee status”, the fact that Rwanda is outside the Convention’s legal space, and “the absence of any legally enforceable mechanism for the applicant’s return to the United Kingdom in the event of a successful merits challenge”. That measure was a hold on one removal pending the domestic courts. It ceased to have effect on 6 February 2023 when the High Court quashed the decision to remove him. It is not in force and this page does not describe it as if it were.

What Parliament did in answer

The Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Act 2024 received Royal Assent on 25 April 2024. The Coalition quotes its provisions as enacted, because the version now on the statute book is blank.

Section 1(2)(b): the Act “gives effect to the judgement of Parliament that the Republic of Rwanda is a safe country”. Section 2(1): “Every decision-maker must conclusively treat the Republic of Rwanda as a safe country.” Section 2(4): a court or tribunal “must not consider” any claim “that the Republic of Rwanda will or may remove or send a person to another State in contravention of any of its international obligations”, any claim “that a person will not receive fair and proper consideration of an asylum, or other similar, claim in the Republic of Rwanda”, or any claim “that the Republic of Rwanda will not act in accordance with the Rwanda Treaty”. Those are the three things the Supreme Court had found.

Section 4 preserved a challenge based on “compelling evidence relating specifically to the person’s particular individual circumstances”. Section 4(2) then removed refoulement from it: the individual exception “does not permit a decision-maker to consider any matter, claim or complaint to the extent that it relates to the issue of whether the Republic of Rwanda will or may remove or send the person in question to another State”.

Section 3 disapplied, for decisions under the Act, sections 2, 3 and 6 to 9 of the Human Rights Act 1998, in the terms and to the extent set out in subsections (3) to (5). Section 5(2) provided that “it is for a Minister of the Crown (and only a Minister of the Crown) to decide whether the United Kingdom will comply with” an interim measure of the European Court of Human Rights, and section 5(3) that a court “must not have regard to the interim measure”. Section 1(4) recorded that “the validity of an Act is unaffected by international law”, and section 1(6) defined international law to include, at paragraph (d), “the United Nations Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment of 1984”, and at paragraph (g), “any order, judgment, decision or measure of the European Court of Human Rights”.

The Coalition adds nothing to that text. It notes only that the Act was never applied to a removal. It came into force on the day the Rwanda treaty did, and no one was removed under it. On 1 September 2025 the Home Secretary told the House of Commons that the scheme ran “for two and a half years during which time only four volunteers were sent, so nobody was returned”. On 17 November 2025 her successor put its cost at “£700 million”. Section 40 of the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Act 2025 reads, in full: “The Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Act 2024 is repealed.” It took effect on Royal Assent, 2 December 2025.

The returns to France

What follows is an allegation put to the United Kingdom by independent experts, not a finding. The Coalition labels it as such and publishes it because the source can be named and checked, and because no reply has been made.

On 8 December 2025 nine United Nations mandate holders, including the Special Rapporteur on the human rights of migrants and the Working Group on discrimination against women and girls, wrote to the United Kingdom about the Agreement with France. They described the mechanism: people arriving by small boat “can be detained immediately and their asylum claim declared inadmissible if the Home Office is of the view that they could have claimed asylum in France”. They observed that the Agreement’s readmission criteria “do not require individualised assessment”, and that “it appears that all those selected for possible removal to France are detained”. They recorded “serious concerns that the abridged system established under the Agreement may have the effect of minimising and/or disregarding vulnerabilities, including evidence of indicators of contemporary forms of slavery and trafficking in persons”. They welcomed the exclusion of unaccompanied children, and were concerned about children wrongly assessed as adults.

They set out seven individual cases. One describes a removal, in October 2025, of a man who on the account given was hooded, forced to the ground and held with boots on his neck. The letter put eleven questions to the government, including what undertakings exist about non-refoulement from France, and ended: “we therefore respectfully call your Excellency’s Government to end this agreement with France”. The letter cites no aggregate figure for returns, and the Coalition attaches none to it. The mandate holders did not allege that France would return anyone onward to a country of origin, and this page does not say they did.

What the Committee against Torture has said, and what it has not been able to

The Committee’s most recent concluding observations on the United Kingdom are dated 7 June 2019. They predate the Rwanda scheme by nearly three years. The United Kingdom filed its seventh periodic report in August 2023; the Committee has not yet examined it. Neither the Committee’s list of issues of June 2022 nor the United Kingdom’s own report mentions Rwanda. The Committee against Torture has never pronounced on the scheme, and the Coalition does not suggest otherwise.

What the Committee did say in 2019 bears directly on both grounds of this designation. On asylum decisions, it expressed “serious concern about reports that Home Office caseworkers very frequently do not apply the appropriate standard of proof applicable to asylum claims and arbitrarily reject credible medical evidence of past torture, resulting in the arbitrary denial of asylum claims made by victims of past torture”. On detention, it was “very concerned by reports that victims of torture are routinely detained for immigration purposes”, that the mechanisms for identifying them “are largely ineffective”, and that “the time limit for immigration detention is still not defined by law”. It asked the United Kingdom to review the standard of proof, to compile statistics on people returned despite a claimed risk of torture, which the state does not publish, and to “consider setting in law a reasonable time limit on the duration of administrative immigration detention”. Those are concerns and recommendations, not findings of violation, and no later document has replaced them.

The Committee could not have made a finding of violation in any event. The United Kingdom ratified the Convention on 8 December 1988 and made the declaration under article 21, which accepts complaints from other states. It has never made the declaration under article 22, the one that allows an individual to complain. In 2019 the Committee “encourages the State party to consider making the declaration under article 22”. It has not. No person the United Kingdom has detained, refused or removed can bring that to the Committee.

What runs the other way

The Rwanda policy was upheld by the Divisional Court, and in the Court of Appeal the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Burnett of Maldon, would have upheld it. He dissented: “The evidence taken as a whole does not support such a real risk in either case”, and “there is no question here of the British authorities simply assuming that the Rwandan asylum system was adequate. On the contrary, the realities were explored and perceived difficulties addressed.” The Supreme Court disagreed with him, and the Coalition reports the Supreme Court. But the dissent was that of the senior judge of England and Wales, and it belongs on this page.

In Othman v United Kingdom, on 17 January 2012, the European Court of Human Rights held unanimously that the deportation of a man to Jordan on the strength of diplomatic assurances “would not be in violation of Article 3”. It held that “assurances are not in themselves sufficient to ensure adequate protection against the risk of ill-treatment” and must be examined in their practical application, but that “it will only be in rare cases that the general situation in a country will mean that no weight at all can be given to assurances”. The United Kingdom won the article 3 point. It lost on article 6, because of the real risk that evidence obtained by torture would be admitted at his retrial. The Supreme Court in AAA applied the Othman test on assurances and reached the opposite result on the facts before it.

The government’s stated position, given to the special procedures on 11 April 2024, is that “the Government takes its international obligations seriously and our approach is not incompatible with international law”, that “there is nothing in the UN Refugee Convention which prevents relocation to a safe third country”, and that the Supreme Court “did not disturb” the lower courts’ conclusion on that point. That is accurate as far as it goes; the Supreme Court did not decide that question. The government also described the treaty it signed with Rwanda on 5 December 2023 as containing “an undertaking from Rwanda that they will not remove any person relocated under the Migration and Economic Development Partnership (MEDP) except to the UK”, together with binding obligations on accommodation, food and medical care.

The United Kingdom ratified the Optional Protocol on 10 December 2003, so its places of detention are open to international inspection. It replied to the special procedures’ letters on the Rwanda memorandum, the Rwanda treaty, the Safety of Rwanda Bill and the Illegal Migration Bill, though the first of those took twenty-one months. And it repealed the Act. A Parliament repealing its own conclusive-presumption statute is the strongest correction on this page, and the Coalition records it as such.

What is not established

That anyone was removed to Rwanda by force. Nobody was. Four people went voluntarily. The statement that nobody was ever sent to Rwanda is false, and the Coalition does not make it.

That any United Nations body has found the United Kingdom in violation of the Convention against Torture. None has, and none could have, because no individual complaint against the United Kingdom is admissible.

That the Committee against Torture has addressed the Rwanda scheme or the France agreement. It has not, in any document.

That the Supreme Court held Rwanda unsafe in the abstract, or third-country processing unlawful. It held neither. It found a real risk at the relevant time on the evidence before it, and said the deficiencies might be remedied.

That the European Court of Human Rights has ruled on the merits of either scheme. It has not. Its only intervention was an interim measure in one case, spent since February 2023.

Anything in the special procedures’ letter of 8 December 2025 as fact. It is an allegation. The United Kingdom has not answered it, and until it does the allegation stands unanswered, which is a different thing from standing proven.

Any number of people returned to France. The Coalition has not verified one and publishes none.

What this page does not yet carry

A section naming the organisations in the United Kingdom that act for people facing removal under the France agreement or detention pending it, with contact details that have been checked. It is being built.

The Committee against Torture’s examination of the seventh periodic report, when it happens. This page will be revised the day the concluding observations are issued.

If you can correct anything on this page, the Coalition wants to hear it.

Sources

Every source relied on above, linked so it can be read in full rather than through this summary.

Courts. R (on the application of AAA (Syria) and others) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2023] UKSC 42, 15 November 2023, paragraphs 21 to 25, 38, 52, 102 to 105 and 149. The same case in the Court of Appeal, [2023] EWCA Civ 745, 29 June 2023, paragraphs 17 and 109, and the dissent of Lord Burnett of Maldon CJ at paragraphs 524 and 527. Othman (Abu Qatada) v United Kingdom, no. 8139/09, 17 January 2012, paragraphs 186 to 188, 205 and 287. European Court of Human Rights, press releases ECHR 197 (2022) of 14 June 2022 and ECHR 112 (2023) of 11 April 2023, on the interim measure in N.S.K. v United Kingdom, no. 28774/22.

Legislation. Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Act 2024, as enacted, sections 1 to 5 and 10. Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Act 2025, c. 31, sections 40 and 65(3)(a).

Parliament. House of Commons, Hansard, 1 September 2025, Borders and Asylum, the Home Secretary; 17 November 2025, Asylum Policy, the Home Secretary; House of Lords, 30 October 2025, the Minister of State. Retrieved through the official Hansard interface.

Committee against Torture. Concluding observations on the sixth periodic report of the United Kingdom, CAT/C/GBR/CO/6, 7 June 2019, paragraphs 36 to 37, 52 to 55, 67 and 69. List of issues prior to the seventh report, CAT/C/GBR/QPR/7, 8 June 2022. Seventh periodic report of the United Kingdom, CAT/C/GBR/7, received 15 August 2023.

United Nations special procedures. AL GBR 20/2025, 8 December 2025, on the Agreement with France; OL GBR 9/2022, 1 July 2022, on the Rwanda memorandum; OL GBR 1/2024, 25 January 2024, on the Rwanda treaty; AL GBR 2/2024, 21 February 2024, on the Safety of Rwanda Bill; OL GBR 9/2023, 4 May 2023, on the Illegal Migration Bill; and the United Kingdom’s replies of 11 April 2024 and 21 April 2024. All at the communications database.

Treaty status, from the depositary. United Nations Treaty Collection, chapter IV-9 for the ratification of 8 December 1988 and the article 21 declaration, and chapter IV-9-b for the ratification of the Optional Protocol on 10 December 2003.

Compiled 10 September 2026. Where this page summarises a decision or a report, the full document is linked above and should be read in preference to this summary. Every quotation was taken from the document itself. Four points in the Coalition’s working notes were corrected before publication: that nobody went to Rwanda, when four people did voluntarily; that the Committee against Torture had addressed deportation with assurances, when its 2019 passage on assurances concerns intelligence sharing; that section 3(2) of the 2024 Act disapplied the Human Rights Act, when it only listed the provisions; and that the repeal was commenced by regulations, when it took effect on Royal Assent. Corrections to the Coalition.

Why this page is here. Australia has no part in the United States removal programme, and nothing on this page concerns it. Australia is here because of its own conduct, judged by the same standard the Coalition applies everywhere: what a state has done, what a court or a treaty body has found about it, and whether a person harmed by it has anywhere to go. The Coalition holds every state to that standard, including the states that write the reports about other states.

What has happened

Since August 2012 Australia has transferred people who arrived by boat without a visa to detention centres on Nauru and on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea, under arrangements with those two governments, and has argued to the treaty bodies that the people held there were not under its jurisdiction. It funded the centres, was authorised to manage them jointly, monitored them, and chose the private companies that built, guarded and ran them. The Manus Island centre closed on 31 October 2017. The Nauru arrangements have not been ended, and in February 2025 a second and legally distinct arrangement with Nauru came into force under which people are removed from Australia to Nauru on an indefinite stay visa. Inside Australia, detention remains mandatory for any person without a valid visa, with no maximum period set by law.

Human Rights Watch, marking twenty-five years of the policy on 9 September 2026, records the scale. Australia’s offshore system began on 17 September 2001, when a naval ship carried the first group of people seeking asylum to Nauru. “From 2001 to 2008, Australia transferred 1,637 asylum seekers to Naoero and Manus Island.” “In this second phase, from 2012 until 2026, Australia transferred more than 4,000 asylum seekers to Naoero and PNG.” “At least 14 people have died in Australia’s offshore detention system since 2012.” On the present day it says: “While Australia no longer sends people to Manus Island following a 2016 PNG Supreme Court ruling, it continues to forcibly transfer people seeking asylum to Naoero, with an estimated 110 people currently there.” That is an estimate by a named organisation with a documented method, not a finding, and it is the most recent figure the Coalition has been able to verify. Note what it counts: people on Nauru, not people behind a detention perimeter. Nauru holds people at the processing centre and people in community accommodation, and the Coalition has found no current breakdown between the two.

What the treaty bodies have found: two treaties, two bodies, two islands

The Coalition keeps these findings apart, because they rest on different treaties and were made by different bodies, and a page that merged them would be wrong.

Manus Island: the Committee against Torture, November 2025

On 27 November 2025 the Committee against Torture adopted its decision in A.A. v Australia, communication No. 1079/2021. The complainant, an Iranian national, was transferred to Manus Island in 2013. While detained there he was attacked; in the Committee’s own words, by “an unknown person who slashed his throat”. The Coalition uses the Committee’s words rather than the complainant’s account, which is that a guard did it, because the Committee did not find that.

Australia argued that it “did not exercise any effective control over detainees in the Manus Regional Processing Centre in Papua New Guinea because its officials at no time detained those individuals or took physical custody of them”. Australia did not contest what had happened to him there; the Committee recorded that the State Party “has refrained from commenting on the merits of the complainant’s allegation with regard to his time spent in Papua New Guinea”.

The Committee rejected the jurisdictional argument. It found that Australia “funded the detention operations, was authorized to jointly manage them, participated in monitoring them and selected companies that would be responsible (directly or through subcontractors) for construction, security, garrison, health and other services at the detention centre”, and that this amounted to control. It adopted the finding of Australia’s own Senate committee, from December 2014, that “the degree of involvement by the Australian Government in the establishment, use, operation, and provision of total funding for the centre clearly satisfies the test of effective control in international law, and the government’s ongoing refusal to concede this point displayed a denial of Australia’s international obligations”. It added that oversight “should have been all the more stringent since Papua New Guinea is not a State Party to the Convention, rendering the complainant without a remedy under the Convention”.

The Committee found a violation of article 2 (1), read with article 1 (1), and of article 16 (1), for the detention on Manus Island, and a separate violation of article 16 (1) for the man’s detention in Australia. It did not find that Australia had committed torture. It found a failure to prevent it, and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. It urged Australia to let him have his asylum claim examined by Australian authorities, to give him “appropriate redress, including compensation for material and non-material damages, restitution, rehabilitation, satisfaction and guarantees of non-repetition”, and to “ensure that similar violations do not occur in the future”, and asked for a response within ninety days.

The complainant had also asked the Committee to find that his proposed transfer to Nauru would breach article 3. The Committee declared that claim moot, because no decision to transfer him was in force. Nothing in this decision is a finding about Nauru.

The dissent. One of the ten members, Bakhtiyar Tuzmukhamedov, dissented. He wrote that the concept of effective control “is completely irrelevant in the context of the communication at hand”, that Papua New Guinea “entered into the treaty with Australia in the exercise of its free sovereign will and did not surrender its jurisdiction over the territory on which the Centre was set up”, and that the Manus claims “should have been rejected”. He would have found a different violation, of article 5 (1) (b). The Coalition publishes the dissent alongside the decision because a reader is entitled to it.

Nauru: the Human Rights Committee, October 2024

The Committee against Torture has made no finding about Nauru. The Human Rights Committee, which sits under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and not under the Convention against Torture, has made two. In M.I. and Others v Australia, adopted 31 October 2024, it found that Australia “funded the detention operations, was authorized to jointly manage them, participated in monitoring them, selected companies which would be responsible (directly or through subcontractors) for construction, security, garrison, health and other services at the detention centre, and provided police services to Nauru to help manage the detention operations”, that its control “went beyond a general situation of dependence and support”, and that “the transfer of the authors to Nauru did not extinguish the State party’s obligations towards them under article 9 of the Covenant”. It found violations of article 9 (1) and (4), ordered compensation for the detention on Christmas Island and on Nauru, and told Australia to “review and modify its migration legislation and policies and any bilateral offshore transfer arrangements for migrants”.

In Nabhari v Australia, adopted 25 October 2024, it reached the same conclusion for a woman held on Nauru from 2014 to 2018: “the physical transfer of the author to Nauru did not extinguish the State party’s obligations towards her under article 9 of the Covenant”. Both findings are about arbitrary detention under article 9. Neither is a finding of torture or ill-treatment.

Inside Australia: article 7 of the Covenant

The Human Rights Committee has found against Australia on immigration detention at least twelve times since 1997, beginning with A v Australia, in which it held that “detention should not continue beyond the period for which the State can provide appropriate justification” and that “without such factors detention may be considered arbitrary, even if entry was illegal”. Three of those decisions found a violation of article 7 of the Covenant, the prohibition on torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment: C v Australia in 2002, and F.K.A.G. and Others and M.M.M. and Others in 2013, the last of which held that the combination of arbitrary, indefinite detention, the refusal of information and procedural rights, and the conditions of detention was “cumulatively inflicting serious psychological harm” on the people held, and told Australia to release them, compensate them and “review its migration legislation to ensure its conformity with the requirements of articles 7 and 9”.

The Committee against Torture’s concluding observations of November 2022 asked Australia to “repeal the legal provisions establishing the mandatory detention of persons entering its territory irregularly”, to “establish statutory time limits for immigration detention”, and to “guarantee that refugees with adverse security or character assessments and stateless persons whose asylum claims were refused are not held in detention indefinitely”. Australia’s follow-up report of May 2024 answered: “Immigration detention is administrative in nature and is not used for punitive purposes.”

The inspection Australia agreed to, and then obstructed

Australia ratified the Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture on 21 December 2017. The Optional Protocol has two parts that matter here: it opens every place of detention to unannounced visits by the Subcommittee on Prevention of Torture, and it requires the state to set up its own national inspection body. On ratifying, Australia declared that it was postponing the second obligation for three years. It then obtained an extension to 20 January 2023. As of 30 June 2025 the network was still incomplete, with no body nominated by New South Wales, Queensland or Victoria.

The Subcommittee began its visit on 16 October 2022. It was, in its own words, “denied access to both closed psychiatric facilities and closed forensic facilities in the State of Queensland and to all places of detention, except for federal immigration detention centres, in the State of New South Wales”. It suspended the visit on 23 October 2022, asked for assurances by 31 January 2023, did not receive them, and on 17 February 2023 terminated the visit, having “no prospects of unfettered access to all places of detention in all jurisdictions”. It recorded “a discourteous, and in some cases hostile, reception” and “a fundamental lack of understanding, among both federal and state authorities, of the Optional Protocol”. The two states that blocked it are two of the three that still have no inspection body.

Australia authorised publication of the Subcommittee’s report. It was not required to, and the Coalition records that it did.

What Australia’s own courts have done, in both directions

On 8 November 2023 the High Court of Australia ordered the release of a man held in immigration detention with no prospect of removal, and in reasons delivered on 28 November it overruled its own 2004 decision that had permitted indefinite detention, holding that executive detention of a non-citizen ends when there is no real prospect of removal becoming practicable in the reasonably foreseeable future. That decision, NZYQ v Minister for Immigration, did what the Human Rights Committee had been asking for since 1997, and it did it as a matter of the Australian Constitution.

Parliament’s response was to build a route to Nauru. It inserted new sections into the Migration Act; an Interim Third Country Reception Arrangement with Nauru came into force on 12 February 2025; and people released after NZYQ began to be returned to detention pending removal to Nauru. One of them challenged his removal. The trial judge found as a fact that “the medical services available in Nauru are inadequate to manage [his] condition of severe asthma on an ongoing basis”, and dismissed his application. While his appeal was pending, Parliament passed an Act deeming the Nauru arrangement “valid”, “for all purposes”, against the procedural fairness ground he had raised, and the Attorney-General removed the case into the High Court.

On 6 May 2026, in TCXM v Minister for Immigration and Citizenship, the High Court unanimously dismissed the appeal. In the Court’s own summary, the lawfulness of the arrangement “was conclusively resolved by the operation of item 10 of Sch 1 to the 2025 Amendment Act”, and the Migration Act “authorised and required the removal of the appellant from Australia to Nauru and, in so operating, would not contravene Ch III of the Constitution”. The Coalition has read the Court’s published summary and not the full reasons, which it could not obtain, and it quotes the summary as a summary.

That decision cuts three ways and the Coalition sets out all three. Australia’s highest court held removals to Nauru lawful and constitutional. The challenge to the arrangement was not defeated on its merits; Parliament legislated it away while the appeal was on foot. And a man whom a judge had found Nauru could not treat was ordered removed there anyway. The domestic remedy arrived in 2023, and was then routed around.

What runs the other way

Australia accepted the individual complaint procedure under article 22 of the Convention on 28 January 1993, together with the article 21 procedure, and it has accepted individual complaints under the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Every finding on this page exists because Australia agreed to be answerable. Several of the states this site covers have not.

Australia answers. It replied to eighteen of the twenty-one letters sent to it by United Nations special procedures since 2022, and it replied to essentially every letter about offshore detention before that. It filed its follow-up report to the Committee against Torture. It appeared for its review. It authorised publication of the Subcommittee’s report on the visit it obstructed.

The Manus Island centre closed on 31 October 2017. The High Court ended indefinite detention in 2023, and Parliament created a visa class for people with no real prospect of removal. The Committee against Torture noted the reduction in the number of children in immigration detention.

Australia’s stated position is that it “is entitled to take measures to uphold the integrity of Australia’s national borders”, that a person without a visa “must be detained so that they can undergo the relevant security, health and identity checks”, and that detention “is administrative in nature and is not used for punitive purposes”. The Coalition reports that position in Australia’s words.

One member of the Committee against Torture dissented in A.A., on the ground that Papua New Guinea never surrendered jurisdiction, and the High Court was unanimous in TCXM. Anyone who reads this page as a record of a state that has lost every argument has not read it.

What is not established

That any body has found that Australia committed torture. None has. The Committee against Torture found a failure to prevent, and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. The Human Rights Committee found treatment contrary to article 7 of the Covenant, which covers both torture and ill-treatment, without characterising it as torture.

That the Committee against Torture has found Australia responsible for Nauru. It has not. The Nauru findings are the Human Rights Committee’s, on arbitrary detention. The Committee against Torture declared the Nauru claim in A.A. moot.

That a guard cut the complainant’s throat on Manus Island. That is his account. The Committee found that an unknown person did.

That A.A. is the first such decision. The Coalition has seen that claim and has not verified it, and does not repeat it.

How many people on Nauru are confined, as against living in community accommodation. Investigating. Human Rights Watch’s estimate of 110, quoted above, counts people on the island. No source the Coalition has verified breaks that number down, and no figure is published for how many people have been removed to Nauru under the arrangement that came into force in February 2025. Only the Department of Home Affairs or Senate Estimates can settle either, and the Coalition uses no number it has not verified.

Whether Australia has responded to the Committee in A.A. The ninety-day period ran from early 2026. No response is on the public record as of the date below.

What this page does not yet carry

A section naming the organisations in Australia, on Nauru and in Papua New Guinea that act for people held under these arrangements, with contact details that have been checked. It is being built.

The full reasons of the High Court in TCXM. The Court’s website could not be reached in a way that respected its access rules, and the Coalition does not go around those. The published summary is quoted, and marked as a summary.

If you can correct anything on this page, the Coalition wants to hear it.

Sources

Every source relied on above, linked so it can be read in full rather than through this summary.

Committee against Torture. A.A. v Australia, communication No. 1079/2021, CAT/C/83/D/1079/2021, adopted 27 November 2025, issued 23 January 2026, with the individual opinion of Mr Tuzmukhamedov annexed. Concluding observations on the sixth periodic report of Australia, CAT/C/AUS/CO/6, adopted 23 November 2022, paragraphs 27 to 30, 41 and 43 to 44. Australia’s follow-up report, CAT/C/AUS/FCO/6, received 13 May 2024, paragraphs 5 to 8. List of issues prior to the seventh report, CAT/C/AUS/QPR/7, 31 December 2025, paragraphs 15 and 20.

Subcommittee on Prevention of Torture. Visit to Australia undertaken from 16 to 23 October 2022, CAT/OP/AUS/ROSP/1, 20 December 2023, paragraphs 1, 4, 6, 7, 14 and 15. Commonwealth Ombudsman, Australian National Preventive Mechanism Annual Report 2024–25.

Human Rights Committee. M.I. and Others v Australia, CCPR/C/142/D/2749/2016, 31 October 2024. Nabhari v Australia, CCPR/C/142/D/3663/2019, 25 October 2024. M.M.M. and Others v Australia, CCPR/C/108/D/2136/2012, 25 July 2013. F.K.A.G. and Others v Australia, CCPR/C/108/D/2094/2011, 26 July 2013. C v Australia, CCPR/C/76/D/900/1999, 28 October 2002. A v Australia, CCPR/C/59/D/560/1993, 3 April 1997.

High Court of Australia. TCXM v Minister for Immigration and Citizenship [2026] HCA 13, 6 May 2026, judgment summary, which states that it is not a substitute for the Court’s reasons. NZYQ v Minister for Immigration, Citizenship and Multicultural Affairs [2023] HCA 37, orders 8 November 2023, reasons 28 November 2023, (2023) 280 CLR 137.

Treaty status, from the depositary. United Nations Treaty Collection, chapter IV-9 for the ratification of 8 August 1989 and the article 21 and article 22 declarations of 28 January 1993, and chapter IV-9-b for the ratification of the Optional Protocol on 21 December 2017 and the declaration postponing Part IV.

Reports. Human Rights Watch, Australia: 25 Years of Abusive Offshore Detention, 9 September 2026.

United Nations special procedures. The communications database, searched for Australia on 10 September 2026: twenty-one letters since 2022, none on immigration detention or offshore processing; the most recent on offshore detention is AUS 4/2019 of 2 April 2019, answered 3 June 2019.

Compiled 10 September 2026. Where this page summarises a decision or a report, the full document is linked above and should be read in preference to this summary. Every quotation was taken from the document itself, except the High Court summary, which is quoted as a summary. Four claims that appeared in the Coalition’s working notes were removed before publication because they could not be verified or were wrong: that the Committee against Torture had found Australia responsible for Nauru, that A.A. was the first such decision, that a guard carried out the attack on Manus Island, and that special procedures had raised offshore detention with Australia since 2022. The figure of 110 is quoted as what Human Rights Watch published, an estimate of people on Nauru, and is not restated as a number of people detained. Corrections to the Coalition.

Why this page is here, and a correction. An Alert was designated for Poland on 9 September 2026 on the ground of the transfers from the United States, and lifted on 10 September 2026 because every person documented as moved through Poland was a Ukrainian national moved to Ukraine, which is their own country. That lifting was right and stands. The Coalition then applied its own rule, that no state is treated differently, and looked at what Poland has been found to have done on its own account. It found six final judgments. The Alert returns on that ground, and on nothing to do with the United States. Both records are kept on this page, and they are kept apart.

What Poland has been found to have done

There are two lines of judgment against Poland, and they have nothing to do with each other. One is about a border, between 2016 and 2017 and again in 2022 and 2024, where people who came to ask for protection were sent back. The other is about a villa at Stare Kiejkuty where, in 2002 and 2003, the Central Intelligence Agency held and tortured two men. The Coalition sets them out separately because running them together as a single story about Polish conduct would misstate both.

The border: six findings, and a policy

Between 2020 and 2024 the European Court of Human Rights gave judgment against Poland in six cases arising from official border crossings: M.K. and Others, on 23 July 2020; D.A. and Others, on 8 July 2021; A.B. and Others and A.I. and Others, both in 2022; T.Z. and Others, in October 2022; and Sherov and Others, on 4 April 2024. The first five concern the crossing at Terespol on the border with Belarus. Sherov concerns Medyka, on the border with Ukraine. The applicants were Chechens, Syrians and others. All six judgments are final. Poland asked the Grand Chamber to refer M.K. and was refused.

What the applicants did was present themselves at an official crossing, in the lawful way, and say they wanted to claim asylum. In M.K. the three applicants did this thirty-five, eight and nineteen or more times. No procedure was ever opened. The Court held that “pending an application for international protection, a State cannot deny access to its territory to a person presenting himself or herself at a border checkpoint who alleges that he or she may be subjected to ill-treatment if he or she remains on the territory of the neighbouring State, unless adequate measures are taken to eliminate such a risk”, and found a violation of article 3 because Poland “knowingly exposed them to a serious risk of chain refoulement”.

It then found something further, and it is the finding that matters most for this page. The refusals were not individual mistakes. They “were part of a wider policy of not receiving applications for international protection from persons presenting themselves at the Polish-Belarusian border and of returning those persons to Belarus, in violation of domestic and international law”, and so amounted to collective expulsion, prohibited by article 4 of Protocol No. 4. The Court also found a violation of article 13, because there was no effective remedy against any of it.

Where the Court did not decide, this page says so. In both M.K. and D.A. the Court found it unnecessary to examine how the applicants were treated during the border checks themselves. There is no finding about conditions. In M.K. the Court recorded that one applicant claimed that after being returned he was captured, detained and tortured; that is his account as the Court recorded it, and the Court made no finding on it.

What Poland did after being ordered to stop

In M.K. and again in D.A. the Court found that Poland had breached article 34 of the Convention, which is the provision that protects the right of individual petition. This is rare, and the reasoning is worth reading in the Court’s own words.

The Court had indicated interim measures directing Poland not to return the applicants to Belarus. “Despite the indication of the interim measures, the applicants were turned away to Belarus not only on the days on which the measures were indicated but also at least a few times thereafter. It should be noted that on a number of those occasions the applicants were carrying with them copies of letters informing them of the indication of an interim measure in respect of their cases and that their representatives had sent copies of those letters directly to the Border Guard.”

The Court further recorded that the government “continuously questioned the possibility of complying with the interim measures”, argued that the applicants “had abused this tool in order to force the Border Guard to admit them to Poland”, and “continued to rely on those arguments even after the Court rejected them”. At the date of judgment two of the measures “still not been complied with and remain in force”. The conclusion was unanimous: “Poland has failed to discharge its obligations under Article 34 of the Convention.”

Stare Kiejkuty: what the Court found, and what it did not

On 24 July 2014 the Court gave judgment in two cases on the same day, Al Nashiri v. Poland and Husayn (Abu Zubaydah) v. Poland. Both men were held by the Central Intelligence Agency at a site at Stare Kiejkuty in 2002 and 2003. Both are still held at Guantanamo Bay.

The Court found that “it is inconceivable that the rendition aircraft could have crossed Polish airspace, landed in and departed from a Polish airport, or that the CIA occupied the premises in Stare Kiejkuty and transported detainees there, without the Polish State being informed of and involved”. It found that Poland “knew of the nature and purposes of the CIA’s activities on its territory” and had “cooperated in the preparation and execution” of them, and that Poland “ought to have known that, by enabling the CIA to detain such persons on its territory, it was exposing them to a serious risk of treatment contrary to the Convention”.

The operative finding, identical in both cases, is a violation of article 3 “on account of the respondent State’s complicity in the CIA High-Value Detainees Programme in that it enabled the US authorities to subject the applicant to torture and ill-treatment on its territory and to transfer the applicant from its territory despite the existence of a real risk that he would be subjected to treatment contrary to Article 3”. The Court also found a separate violation of article 3 for the failure to investigate, and violations of articles 5, 8, 13 and 6 in each case. In Al Nashiri it found in addition a violation of articles 2 and 3 with article 1 of Protocol No. 6, because of the real risk of the death penalty.

What the Court did not find. It did not find that Poland tortured anyone. It accepted the experts’ view, and said so, that “the interrogations and, therefore, the torture inflicted on the applicant at the Stare Kiejkuty black site were the exclusive responsibility of the CIA and that it is unlikely that the Polish officials witnessed or knew exactly what happened inside the facility”. Poland’s responsibility is for acquiescence and connivance, for making it possible, and for failing afterwards to investigate. That is the ceiling of the finding and this page does not go above it.

Twelve years on, the Committee of Ministers is still supervising both judgments. In an interim resolution of December 2022 it recorded that “the consequences of the violations of the Convention for the applicants have not been remedied” and noted “with deep regret the lack of any information attesting developments in the adoption of the other measures necessary to guarantee non-repetition”. Poland has asked the United States for assurances against the death penalty, as the Court told it to. The Committee’s record of the answer, most recently in May 2023, is that the requests “could not be granted, chiefly because the European Convention on Human Rights and judgments of the Court do not reflect the obligations of the United States under international law”. Poland’s own criminal investigation was discontinued on 30 November 2020 and the discontinuance upheld on appeal in September 2021.

What has changed since, in both directions

The Committee of Ministers closed its supervision of the individual measures in D.A., A.I., A.B. and T.Z. on 14 March 2024, and in Sherov on 4 December 2025, satisfied that the awards had been paid. It said in the same resolution that this “in no way prejudges the Committee’s evaluation of the general measures in relation to the problem of non-acceptance of asylum applications and refusing entry to foreigners entering Poland from Belarus”. Supervision of the general measures in M.K. remains open, classified as a complex problem, last examined in December 2025.

On 27 March 2025 Poland repealed the provision, introduced in 2021, that let the head of the Aliens Office decline to examine an application from someone who had entered irregularly. The Committee noted that with interest, and recorded that it had been used in only five cases. On the same day a different power came into force. An Act of 21 February 2025 introduced the concept of instrumentalisation of migration, and where the government finds it, the right to apply for international protection can be suspended for up to sixty days in a defined area, renewable with the consent of the Sejm. It was imposed at the Belarus border on 27 March 2025 and, on the Committee’s record, continues. The Committee’s assessment: the mechanism “provides for further restrictions of the right to apply for international protection” and “is a matter of concern”.

A note on scope, because it is the thing most often got wrong. Every judgment above concerns official border crossings between 2016 and 2017. The pushbacks in the forest on the Belarus border from the summer of 2021 are a different set of facts and have not been ruled on. The leading case, R.A. and Others v. Poland, was relinquished to the Grand Chamber in November 2021 and heard on 12 February 2025. There is no judgment. The one 2021 application to conclude, I.A. and Others, ended on 4 December 2025 in a friendly settlement of 20,000 euros to one household, which is neither a finding against Poland nor a decision in its favour. The Coalition will not say what the Court will hold about 2021, because the Court has not held it.

What Poland says, and what it has done for others

Poland’s position, in its own words to the Committee against Torture in its eighth periodic report: “The scale of migration events on the Polish-Belarusian border intensified in July 2021. The Belarusian regime encouraged foreigners from many countries… to legally come to Belarus, allowing them to enter the country and supporting them in crossing the EU border illegally.” And: “The principle of non-refoulement is respected… Each foreign national seeking protection has the right to apply for international protection at any time, even while staying in Poland illegally.” The Coalition publishes that because a page that left it out would be worth less.

And this, which no other state on this list can show. At the end of 2025 Poland was hosting 972,287 refugees from Ukraine, on the United Nations refugee agency’s own figures, having held roughly a million every year since 2022. The state found by the Court to have turned people away at Terespol is the same state that opened its border to a million people two years later. Both facts are true, they are not in tension, and the Coalition reports both.

What has happened

Poland is not like the other states in this project, and the difference should be stated before anything else. It is a member of the European Union, a party to the European Convention on Human Rights, and the country that took in more people fleeing Ukraine than any other. Nobody removed from the United States is documented as having stayed in Poland. Every transfer the Coalition can verify is transit. Aircraft land at Rzeszów-Jasionka, people are driven to the crossing at Medyka, and they go over the border into Ukraine.

So the question this page asks is narrower than the one asked of Ghana or Eswatini. It is not what Poland does to people who arrive. It is whether Poland is being used as a corridor to return Ukrainian nationals across a border into a country at war, and what a person moved that way has available to them.

The denial, in the government’s own words.

The Coalition puts this high on the page rather than at the foot of it. On 13 May 2026 a spokesperson for the Ministry of the Interior and Administration told Reuters that Poland has no agreement or arrangement with the United States regarding deportations, and that this is an internal matter between two countries, Ukraine and the United States. She said Poland was a transit stop with no direct part in the removals, that the Border Guard carried out flight clearance procedures only, and that a Ukrainian citizen to be deported from the United States to Ukraine may not have a right to enter Poland, so a simple check is made within the Border Guard’s statutory competence.

Amnesty International and Human Rights First wrote to the Foreign Minister and the Interior Minister on 17 April 2026 and had no reply in the twenty-six days before they published. No statement by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs or by the Border Guard in its own name has been found.

Ministry of the Interior and Administration, to Reuters, 13 May 2026. Amnesty International and Human Rights First, 13 May 2026. Both linked below.

What the monitoring record actually says, which is less than it is often taken to say.

Poland appears once in Third Country Deportation Watch, in a list of states said to have arrangements for temporary transfer before onward return to the home country. That is a categorisation by the people keeping the list. It is not a document, and the sentence does not say agreement. The tracker maintained by the United States Committee for Refugees and Immigrants does not list Poland at all. The Coalition sets the two records side by side and does not resolve them.

There is also a date the Coalition cannot settle. CNN and NPR give 17 November 2025 for the first flight; Amnesty International gives 18 November. Both stand here.

What is on the other side of the crossing

This section is the reason the page exists, and it is written narrowly, from sources, because it is the part most easily overstated.

Ukraine has had a general mobilisation in force since February 2022. Men between eighteen and sixty are subject to registration requirements, and mobilisation applies within a band inside that range. Men of mobilisation age are in general prohibited from leaving the country. The practical consequence for someone driven to Medyka and walked across is that the border is one-way.

What is documented about the November 2025 group is that Ukraine’s State Border Guard Service told CNN that twenty-four of the forty-five men were wanted in connection with the draft and were handed to the police on arrival. The Coalition states that and stops there. It does not assert what happened to them afterwards, because no source it has been able to check says.

Danish Immigration Service, country of origin report on return and mobilisation in Ukraine, March 2026. CNN, 27 March 2026. Both linked below. The Coalition describes the rules as the sources state them and does not advise any person about their position under them.

What the record says about Poland itself

The two State Department editions disagree, and the newer one is the thinner one.

On torture and cruel treatment, the 2023 edition records that there were isolated reports that government officials employed such practices. The 2024 edition records that there were no credible reports that they did. That is a change in the finding, not a change in wording, and the Coalition records it rather than choosing the edition that suits it.

The 2024 edition also runs to roughly a quarter of the length of the 2023 edition, and what it lost is what this page would otherwise use. The 2023 subsection on refoulement is gone. So is every reference to guarded centres and to foreigners in detention, and so is the passage recording the Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights’ concern about cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of people taken into police custody. The 2024 report contains no instance of the words refoulement, guarded, or foreigner. Pushbacks at the Belarus border are retained in both.

Where this page needs the detail, it cites the 2023 edition and says so. The Coalition’s label for Poland remains that no finding of official torture is cited, because that is what the record supports.

United States Department of State, Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, Poland, 2023 and 2024 editions, both linked below.

Detention of foreigners, if it ever applies here.

No source places anyone transferred from the United States in a Polish guarded centre. The Coalition sets the position out anyway, because a person who is stopped rather than waved through is in a different situation from the one described above. Detention of an asylum applicant may run to six months; pre-removal detention may run to eighteen months in total. The European Committee for the Prevention of Torture visited Poland in 2022 and reported in February 2024 on centres including Biała Podlaska, Białystok and Wędrzyn. The Polish government’s reply to that report could not be retrieved when this page was compiled, and is noted below as missing rather than summarised from second hand.

Asylum Information Database, Poland, duration of detention, updated 30 July 2026, citing article 89(4) and (5) of the Law on Protection and article 404(5) of the Law on Foreigners. European Committee for the Prevention of Torture, report on Poland, CPT/Inf(2024)10.

What is open, and the difficulty that runs through all of it

Poland has more machinery than any other state in this project. The difficulty is that most of it needs a Polish proceeding to attach to, and a person driven from an aircraft to a border crossing never enters one.

The European Court of Human Rights. Open, and the interim measure under Rule 39 is the only mechanism named anywhere on this site that can stop a removal within hours. The Court’s own practice direction sets the terms. Measures are indicated only where there is prima facie evidence of an imminent risk of irreparable harm, and not where the person would merely endure hardship. The Court will not act while a domestic remedy with suspensive effect remains open. A request should be sent as soon as possible after the final domestic decision, and the Court warns that it may not be able to deal with a request in a removal case received less than a working day before the removal is due. It will not deal with requests sent by email.

The Committee against Torture. Open. Poland made the declaration under articles 21 and 22 on 12 May 1993, recognising the competence of the Committee to consider communications from individuals. Slow, and with no suspensive effect of its own.

The national preventive mechanism. Poland ratified the Optional Protocol on 14 September 2005. The mechanism sits inside the Commissioner for Human Rights. It inspects places of detention systematically. It does not decide individual complaints and it cannot stop a removal. It is where evidence about conditions comes from, not where relief comes from.

The Court of Justice of the European Union. No direct route for an individual. A Polish court hearing the case may refer a question to it. That requires a live Polish proceeding, which is the thing a person moved through in transit does not have.

A complaint to the European Commission. Anyone may report a member state for breaching European Union law. The Commission states that it will not offer individual redress or compensation, and will not review decisions taken in individual cases. It is a lever on a system, not a remedy for a person.

European Court of Human Rights, practice direction on requests for interim measures. United Nations Treaty Collection, chapters IV-9 and IV-9-b. European Commission, on reporting a breach of European Union law. All linked below.

The first days

The window in Poland is short, and in the cases documented so far it has been a matter of hours. Anything that is going to be done has to be started before the vehicle reaches the crossing.

Who is reachable in Poland

For officials who administer this

This section is addressed to the Polish officials who clear these flights and staff that crossing, and it is not written as a warning. The Ministry’s position is that this is an internal matter between two other countries and that Poland performs a flight clearance and an entry check. Taken at its word, that description contains the whole of the difficulty, because a check of whether a person may enter Poland is not a check of what happens to them when they do not.

Poland accepted the individual complaint procedure under the Convention against Torture in 1993, and ratified the Optional Protocol in 2005, at a time when very few states in this record had done either. Those commitments were not made for the ordinary case. The question they were made for is the one that arrives on an aircraft with a list of names, where the person clearing it is the last official in a European Union member state who will see the people concerned before they cross into a country at war. A note on the file recording what was asked, and of whom, costs nothing now and is the only thing that will exist later.

The dated record

Every entry below is a fact with a source.

What is not established

That any agreement or arrangement exists between Poland and the United States. The government denies it, and no instrument has been produced by anyone. That anyone transferred from the United States was held in a Polish guarded centre; the evidence points the other way. The nationality of the five women on the first flight. The number of people aboard the March and April 2026 flights, and where those people are now. Whether Polish officials knew that anyone aboard had a pending protection claim in the United States. Which date is correct for the first flight.

And this, which the Coalition states as plainly as the rest: no court, treaty body or European Union institution has made any finding about the transfers through Poland from the United States. Nothing in the section above should be read as though one had. The six judgments set out at the head of this page concern the border and the secret detention site. They say nothing about these flights, and the Coalition does not borrow their authority for them.

That the Committee against Torture has found Poland in breach of article 3. It has not. Its most recent concluding observations on Poland are dated 29 August 2019, they predate the events of 2021, and they express concern and make recommendations, which are different acts from a finding. Poland filed its eighth periodic report in August 2023 and the Committee has not yet examined it.

That the European Court has ruled on the pushbacks in the forest from 2021. It has not, and the leading case is undecided.

That Poland has withdrawn its reservation to article 20 of the Convention against Torture, the inquiry procedure. The depositary record shows only the withdrawal of the article 30 reservation, on 19 December 2025.

The Coalition writes Investigating rather than none found, because the second phrase reads as though a question has been answered when it has only been asked.

What this page does not yet carry

The Polish government’s response to the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture, CPT/Inf(2024)11, which could not be downloaded when this page was compiled. It is cited by reference and not summarised from second hand.

Any statement by the Border Guard or the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in its own name. The only official position on the record comes from one ministry spokesperson to one news agency.

An answer to the question of which statutory provision the Border Guard applies to a person who lands on an aircraft and leaves by road. A request under the Polish access to public information law would produce it, and the Coalition has not yet made one.

If you can correct anything here, the Coalition wants to hear it.

Sources

Every source used on this page, linked so it can be read in full rather than through the summaries above.

Judgments against Poland. European Court of Human Rights: M.K. and Others v. Poland, nos. 40503/17, 42902/17 and 43643/17, 23 July 2020, final 14 December 2020, paragraphs 179, 183 to 187, 207, 210 to 211 and 235 to 238. D.A. and Others v. Poland, no. 51246/17, 8 July 2021, final 22 November 2021, paragraphs 69 and 98 to 101. A.I. and Others v. Poland, no. 39028/17, 30 June 2022, final 14 November 2022, paragraph 45. A.B. and Others v. Poland, no. 42907/17, 30 June 2022. T.Z. and Others v. Poland, no. 41764/17, 13 October 2022. Sherov and Others v. Poland, no. 54029/17 and others, 4 April 2024. Al Nashiri v. Poland, no. 28761/11, and Husayn (Abu Zubaydah) v. Poland, no. 7511/13, both 24 July 2014, final 16 February 2015, paragraphs 441, 442, 452, 454, 517 and 518 and the operative provisions. I.A. and Others v. Poland, nos. 53181/21 and 53566/21, friendly settlement, 4 December 2025.

Execution of those judgments. Committee of Ministers: Interim Resolution CM/ResDH(2022)353, 8 December 2022, on Al Nashiri and Husayn. Resolution CM/ResDH(2024)47, 14 March 2024, closing D.A., A.I., A.B. and T.Z. Resolution CM/ResDH(2025)391, 4 December 2025, closing Sherov. The execution records for the M.K. group and the Al Nashiri group in the Council of Europe’s HUDOC-EXEC database, as they stood on 10 September 2026.

Poland’s own submissions and treaty position. Eighth periodic report of Poland to the Committee against Torture, CAT/C/POL/8, 14 November 2023, paragraphs 62 and 63. Concluding observations on the seventh periodic report, CAT/C/POL/CO/7, 29 August 2019, paragraphs 25 and 26. United Nations Treaty Collection, chapters IV-9 and IV-9-b. Committee against Torture, general comment No. 4 (2017), CAT/C/GC/4, paragraphs 11 and 12. United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Refugee Data Finder, refugees from Ukraine in Poland, year-end 2022 to 2025.

The transfers, and the response to them. Amnesty International and Human Rights First, 13 May 2026. CNN, 27 March 2026. NPR, 18 November 2025. RMF24, 13 May 2026, carrying the Interior Ministry statement to Reuters. Third Country Deportation Watch, and the tracker maintained by the United States Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, which does not list Poland.

Country conditions and detention. United States Department of State, 2023 report on Poland. The 2024 report. European Committee for the Prevention of Torture, report on Poland, CPT/Inf(2024)10, and the Polish government’s response, CPT/Inf(2024)11. Asylum Information Database, Poland, duration of detention.

Routes. European Court of Human Rights, practice direction on requests for interim measures. United Nations Treaty Collection, Convention against Torture. Optional Protocol. European Commission, on reporting a breach of European Union law.

The other side of the border. Danish Immigration Service, country of origin report on return and mobilisation in Ukraine, March 2026.

Institutions named on this page. Commissioner for Human Rights. Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights. Association for Legal Intervention. UNHCR Poland.

Compiled 9 September 2026, and substantially added to on 10 September 2026 when the Coalition examined Poland’s own conduct rather than only its part in the transfers. Where this page summarises a report, the full document is linked above and should be read rather than relied on through the summary.