Belize

The Coalition’s position. This state agreed to receive people who are not its nationals, moved against their will, under a programme United States federal courts have found punitive and whose purpose was stated publicly before the agreement was made. On the Coalition’s position it has knowingly facilitated that programme, and the wrong is complete at the moment of agreement. Nothing on this page is offered as mitigation. What a receiving state agrees to.

What has happened

This is a short page, and it is short because the record is. Eight people have been sent to Belize. That figure is corroborated four ways. Almost everything else about what happened to them is undocumented, and the Coalition would rather say so than fill the space.

The supervisory vacuum, which is the subject of this page

Four facts, each verified from the body responsible for recording it, and it is their combination that matters.

No individual complaint to the Committee against Torture. Belize acceded to the Convention on 17 March 1986. It has made no declaration under article 22, so no individual may complain to the Committee about it, and none under article 21, so no other state may either. Belize’s own review record places both articles in the column headed not ratified or not accepted.

No treaty body has ever looked. In forty years as a party, Belize has been examined by the Committee against Torture once, in November 1993. What has happened since, and it does not close the gap. The second report fell due in 1996. It arrived on 15 November 2024, twenty-eight years late, and sits on the Committee’s books as CAT/C/BLZ/2. As at the close of the Committee’s eighty-fourth session in May 2026 it had still not been taken up: no list of issues has been published, no concluding observations exist, and Belize appears on no scheduled agenda. The gap in examination runs from November 1993 to today, and the document that would end it has been waiting since 2024. The Optional Protocol machinery has been used once. The Subcommittee on Prevention of Torture made its first visit to Belize from 22 to 27 April 2018. No report of that visit has been published. Under the Optional Protocol a visit report stays confidential unless the State asks for it to be made public, and Belize has not asked. Belize is separately named in the Subcommittee’s eighteenth annual report, CAT/C/82/2, among fifteen States parties not in compliance with article 17, the obligation to build a national preventive mechanism. One supervisory route Belize did accept. It did not opt out under article 28, so the Committee’s article 20 inquiry competence applies to it. That procedure the Committee opens on its own initiative where it receives reliable indications that torture is being practised systematically. It is not a route a transferred person can use.

Correction, 12 September 2026. This page previously stated that the Committee against Torture had never examined Belize in forty years, and that the second report had been overdue since 1996. Both statements were wrong. The Committee examined the initial report in November 1993, and the second report was filed on 15 November 2024. The opening summary also claimed there is no route for an individual complaint anywhere, which this page contradicted further down. All of it is corrected. The errors were found when an external audit of this site was checked against the Committee’s own session documents, CAT/C/83/1 and CAT/C/82/2, and the depositary record.

Its review record carries dashes where the dates of examination would be, with a note that its second report fell due in 1996. Its initial report is roughly thirty-nine years late.

No body with a right to enter a place of detention. Belize acceded to the Optional Protocol on 4 September 2015, which obliges it to establish a national preventive mechanism. Eleven years later it has not done so. The United Nations lists it first among the fourteen states parties whose obligation is substantially overdue.

No regional court. Belize is not among the twenty states that have recognised the contentious jurisdiction of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. It remains an Organization of American States member and subject to the Inter-American Commission under the American Declaration, so a petition is possible, but the Commission’s output does not bind Belize and there is no judicial remedy behind it.

Put together: a person transferred to Belize and mistreated there has the domestic Ombudsman and a non-binding regional petition. Nothing else. That is the single most important thing this page establishes, and the Coalition states it as a finding about institutions rather than as an allegation about conduct.

The agreement, and the ratification that has not been found

On 20 October 2025 the United States and Belize signed an agreement regarding the examination of protection requests. The United States does not call it an asylum cooperative agreement; monitoring projects do. Its text was printed in the Federal Register only as page images, but the State Department has since published a readable text as TIAS 26-415.

What is on the record is what the Belize government said about it. It stated that the agreement would take effect only after ratification by the Senate. On 11 November 2025 the Senate did not ratify it. It referred the agreement to a committee, after a debate in which government, opposition, business and labour representatives all placed objections on the record. The Coalition has found no public record of a Senate vote, and the National Assembly’s own website returns an account suspended notice, but the State Department’s published text records that the agreement entered into force on 15 April 2026.

Eight people were transferred in July 2026. The Coalition sets the two facts side by side and does not assert a conclusion from them, because the absence of a public record of ratification is not the same as proof that none occurred. It is a documented gap, and someone in Belize can close it in an afternoon.

A further point of record. In September 2026 the newly arrived United States Ambassador to Belize, André Bauer, said he had not been briefed on how far the agreement had been used and declined to give figures. The Coalition notes it because the number is eight, and because a government that cannot state it is unlikely to be tracking what became of them. Source: Breaking Belize News, 4 September 2026

The deadline nobody appears to have been told about

Belize’s Refugees Act requires an application for refugee status to be made within fourteen days of arrival. There is a second fourteen day limit in the Act, for appeals, and the refugee agency’s public guidance mentions only that one.

The Coalition has found no account of the eight transferred people being told about the application deadline. It is not alleging that they were not told. It is recording that a statutory limit capable of extinguishing a protection claim runs from the day a person lands, and that nothing in the public record shows anyone explaining it to them.

What runs the other way, and it is substantial

On the documented record Belize compares well with every other state in this batch, and the page says so before it says anything else.

Its Refugees Act contains an express statutory bar on refoulement, at section 14(1). It protects applicants from prosecution for illegal entry. It seats a representative of the United Nations refugee agency on the committee that decides claims, at section 6. Its asylum system is tiny but it is working and it is growing: recognitions went 62, then 69, then 73, then 118 in 2025.

Belize negotiated a ceiling, set in the April 2026 implementation plan at “no more than 100 individuals per year with transfers of no more than 10 per month”, and kept an absolute veto over who comes. It debated the agreement openly in its Senate rather than concluding it quietly, and the objections raised there came from every side of the chamber. Its government says the arrivals are being housed, fed and integrated with the refugee agency.

None of that is undone by the section above. The two things are simply different: Belize looks, on the evidence, like a state that intends to treat these people decently, and it is also a state with almost no machinery for anyone to check.

The first days

Nothing below is advice, and no page can tell a particular person what to do in their case.

Who is reachable in Belize

Every entry below was checked on 11 September 2026. This is the strongest part of the Belize record: the contacts are published, current and specific.

There is no entry here for a national preventive mechanism because Belize has not created one. The Coalition lists no body rather than pointing a reader at something that does not exist.

Also a country people hold protection against

This page describes Belize as a transit or temporary recipient: a state that agreed to take, or has taken, people removed from the United States who are not its nationals. Belize also appears in a second project on this site, Countries Named in Protection Orders, because United States immigration judges protect people from being returned here: in fiscal year 2024 they granted asylum to 11 Belizean nationals, on the immigration courts’ own figures. Sources: EOIR, asylum decisions by nationality, fiscal year 2024 · Coalition copy (PDF)

Those two facts sit together and are not in tension. A state can agree to receive people removed from somewhere else and at the same time be a state that other people cannot lawfully be sent back to. Nothing has been moved: this guide stays where it is.

Protection against return is granted to a person, not to a nationality. Nothing in this section says that people from this country are at risk as a class, and nothing in it should be filed as evidence in anyone’s individual case.

What is still being investigated

Whether the Senate ratified it. It referred the agreement to committee on 11 November 2025. No record of a Senate vote has been found, though the State Department’s published text records that the agreement entered into force on 15 April 2026.

What happened to the eight people. Beyond the government’s statement that they are being housed and integrated, nothing.

Whether any of them was told about the fourteen day deadline. Investigating.

Anything at all from a treaty body, a regional body, or either of the two largest international monitors. There is nothing, because none of them has looked.

The Coalition writes Investigating where a question has been asked and not yet answered.

What this page does not yet carry

Whether the Senate ratified. A person in Belmopan could establish this from the Senate record in an afternoon, and the Coalition would publish it.

A telephone number or email address for the Refugees Department.

Any organisation in Belize doing individual legal representation for people in this position.

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.

Treaty status and the absence of mechanisms. United Nations Treaty Collection, chapters IV-9, in which Belize appears in neither the article 21 nor the article 22 list, and IV-9-b for the accession of 4 September 2015. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, the list of states whose national preventive mechanism is substantially overdue, on which Belize appears first. Inter-American Court of Human Rights, its own list of the twenty states accepting contentious jurisdiction, from which Belize is absent. The annex to Belize’s Universal Periodic Review compilation, recording that its second report to the Committee against Torture has been due in 1996 and not filed until 15 November 2024.

The agreement and the Senate. The agreement regarding the examination of protection requests, signed at Belmopan 20 October 2025, treaty series 26-415, published in the United States Federal Register as page images and by the State Department as a readable text, with the joint implementation plan of April 2026. The proceedings of the Senate of Belize of 11 November 2025. Source: 91 Federal Register 12204, 12 March 2026

Belize law and the asylum system. The Refugees Act, sections 6, 8(1) and 14(1). UNHCR Help Belize for the procedure and for the statement that only the Refugees Department can receive an application.

Compiled 11 September 2026. Where this page summarises a document, the full text is linked above and should be read in preference to this summary. This page is deliberately short. The Coalition has found almost nothing about what happens to people transferred to Belize, and has written that rather than filling the space with material about other countries. One error was caught and corrected during the research for this page: an early reading of Belize’s review record appeared to show that it had accepted the article 21 and article 22 procedures. It shows the opposite. Corrections to the Coalition.