Grenada

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

Grenada signed a memorandum of understanding with the United States in Washington on 30 January 2026. Nobody has been sent. That is the whole of the established record, and the interest of this page lies in what the Prime Minister said about the instrument before he signed it, which is more candid than anything the two governments have published since.

Why the Prime Minister’s interview is the most important document on this page

On 24 January 2026, six days before signature, Dickon Mitchell described the instrument in an interview with a Grenadian programme. Four things he said are of the first importance, and each is sourced to the head of government of the receiving state rather than to a monitoring organisation or to Washington.

First, that it is not binding. “The form of MOU that has been in a sense considered is a non-binding MOU to take what is called Third Country Nationals – meaning they are not nationals of the United States and they are not nationals of Grenada.” The United States classifies it the same way, by publishing it in the library reserved for qualifying non-binding instruments rather than in the treaty series. Two governments, independently, say this is not a treaty.

Second, that the operative terms were left out. Grenada, he said, “did inform Washington in the discussions that it was interested in exploring the possibilities of getting workers under the TCN programme but the U.S government indicated that it wanted St George’s to sign onto just a basic framework agreement for the time being that it was prepared to accept these people. What they said is that the detailed operative conditions they wish to negotiate on a separate actual agreement.” The Coalition has found no such separate agreement. A state has agreed to receive people without agreeing on what happens to them after they land.

Third, that Grenada may refuse. The Prime Minister said the Grenada memorandum and others he had seen contain a clause under which a country can decline a United States request “and that will be the end of the matter”. That is his description of a text the Coalition has not read, and it is recorded as his description.

Fourth, that the purpose is labour. “We have some significant labour constraints in Grenada. We have a labour shortage in the Construction industry … it’s chronic in Agriculture and to some extent in the Hospitality sector.” Grenada would “accept primarily persons who are workers, persons of working age”, who would “probably” have to be “between eighteen and fifty” with “no serious criminal infraction”, and “as much as possible we would want to target persons who have the capacity to work and who probably have the skillset that we have shortage in”. The monitoring project adds that the text gives preference to individuals who contribute to Grenada’s development, which the Coalition records as that project’s reading of a text it has not read either.

A protection claim appears nowhere in any of it. The people the United States removes under this programme include people its own immigration judges have found would face persecution or torture at home. Nothing in the Grenadian frame has a place for such a person, and an eligibility filter built on age and employability will not find one.

The asylum system a person would be placed into

Grenada is a party to neither refugee instrument. It appears in the participant table of neither the 1951 Convention, which has 146 parties, nor the 1967 Protocol, which has 147. The monitoring project says the same and here the tracker and the depositary agree.

The consequence has to be stated precisely, because it is easy to overstate and easy to understate. A person removed to Grenada is removed to a state that owes no non-refoulement obligation under refugee law, because it has not undertaken one. It does owe one under article 3 of the Convention against Torture, to which it acceded on 26 September 2019 without reservations, and under the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights as that treaty has been interpreted. Those are real obligations. They are also obligations that, as the next section shows, no individual can enforce and no body has ever examined.

There is no refugee statute. The United States Department of State’s 2024 report on Grenada states, in terms, that “the law did not provide for the granting of asylum or refugee status, but the government had a system for providing protection to refugees through UNHCR”, and that “the government cooperated with” that agency “and other humanitarian organizations in providing protection and assistance to refugees, returning refugees, or asylum seekers”. The monitoring project puts it less warmly: Grenada “has no formal process for recognizing refugees, with asylum interviews conducted on an ad hoc basis”.

Both can be true at once. A mandate procedure run by the refugee agency is a system, and from the state’s side it is also ad hoc. The Coalition prints both rather than choosing.

How a person would lodge a claim, in physical terms

By email, to another country. The refugee agency’s own instruction to claimants is that it “is responsible for processing asylum claims at the request of the governments in” a list that includes Grenada, and that a person in one of those places who needs information or counselling should “contact the UNHCR Panama office at PANPACarib@unhcr.org”. The same agency’s regional page gives the covering office as the Multi-Country Office in Washington, at usawacab@unhcr.org, and says plainly that it “does not have an office in all of these countries and territories”.

There is no office in Grenada, no counter, no form and no published time limit. The Coalition prints both email addresses below because the agency’s own website gives two different offices, in two different countries, for the same claimant, and it is not for this page to decide which is right.

No caseload figure, recognition rate or waiting time for Grenada is published anywhere the Coalition could find. Whether Grenada operates immigration detention, and under what law, could not be established in either direction, and this page asserts neither.

Who could find out

The short answer is that nobody has, and no individual can make anybody start.

The zero deserves a word about method, because a zero from a search is worth nothing unless the search has been shown to work. The Coalition ran the same query against the Dominican Republic, which returned three documents under the Convention against Torture including a list of issues from 2019, and against Grenada without the treaty filter, which returned thirty-three documents. The filter works and the zero is real.

Computed from the Convention itself rather than read off a page: accession on 26 September 2019 brought the Convention into force for Grenada on 26 October 2019 under article 27(2), which makes the initial report due on 26 October 2020 under article 19(1). As at 11 September 2026 it is five years, ten months and sixteen days overdue. The Coalition flags that as its own arithmetic because an earlier dossier on this project logged a correction for exactly this kind of derived date.

What Grenada does engage with is worth setting against that. It has thirty-three documents across other treaty bodies, including a list of issues prior to reporting from the Human Rights Committee, a report to the committee on discrimination against women submitted as recently as 7 May 2026, concluding observations from that committee, and a report on the rights of the child from January 2020. This is not a state that never reports. It is a state that has never reported on torture.

What runs the other way

This section exists because a page that only carried the case against Grenada would be easy to knock down, and because some of what follows is genuinely to the country’s credit.

Grenada refused first, and kept refusing for more than a year. The Prime Minister said the United States had approached Grenada on the issue over a year earlier and that St George’s had declined. The monitoring project reports that Grenada “initially declined to sign the MOU but agreed after repeated requests from the U.S. government over many months”.

The signature came in the middle of a pressure campaign, not a friendship. Across the same period: visa restrictions on Grenadian officials over Cuban medical programmes in August 2025, partial suspension of immigrant visa processing in January 2026, inclusion on an expanded visa bond list in March 2026, and reported consideration of closing the United States Embassy in Grenada in August 2026. Anyone describing Grenada as a willing collaborator has to account for that sequence.

There is a refusal clause, on the Prime Minister’s account, under which Grenada can decline a request and that is the end of it. And Grenada said it would exclude people with criminal records beyond immigration matters, because “the risk is simply not worth it”.

The memorandum reportedly contains a non-refoulement undertaking. The monitoring project says Grenada committed that third country nationals would not be subjected to persecution or torture in Grenada or in any country to which they were further transferred. That is a paraphrase of a text the Coalition has not read and is not quoted as the instrument’s language. If it is accurate it is a notable term, given by a state that is party to neither refugee treaty, in an instrument both governments say is not binding.

The islands negotiated together. The Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States put together a joint negotiating team “in the interest of saving time and effort” and to ensure consistency. That is capacity, not capitulation.

Grenada lets the refugee agency decide claims although it has no obligation to. A state party to neither refugee instrument that permits mandate determination on its territory, and that the United States Department of State records as cooperating in the protection of refugees, is doing more than its treaty obligations require. It acceded to the Convention against Torture in 2019 voluntarily and entered no reservations. Several of its neighbours did enter reservations, and did so precisely to keep the Committee out.

What is not established

The memorandum itself. No title, no named parties, no text, no entry into force. Nothing on this page is quoted from it.

Whether the separate operative agreement exists. The Prime Minister said the detailed conditions were to be negotiated in one. The Coalition found no trace of it. If it does not exist, there are no operative rules for anyone sent to Grenada, and that is the single most important open question on this page.

Whether the memorandum contains a non-refoulement clause. One monitoring organisation says so. Nobody has read the text publicly.

Whether Cabinet approved it, and whether the undertaking to communicate a decision before signing was honoured.

Whether the age band of eighteen to fifty and the skills preference are terms of the instrument or only the Prime Minister’s stated intentions six days before he signed.

Whether Grenada operates immigration detention, and if so under what statute.

Grenada’s position under the American Convention on Human Rights and whether it has accepted the contentious jurisdiction of the Inter-American Court. The Organization of American States tables that would settle this were behind an automated bot check on 11 September 2026. The Coalition did not go around it and records the point as unreachable rather than guessing.

Any contact details for a Grenadian immigration authority, ombudsman or lawyer.

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 text of the memorandum, which exists in a published bundle the Coalition could not retrieve without breaching a robots file.

Any statement from the Government of Grenada made after signature.

Any account from a person sent to Grenada, because there is not one yet. If a first flight is scheduled, the Coalition wants to know before it lands rather than after.

Verified contact details for the Ombudsman and for the General Legal Council of Grenada, both of which the Coalition wanted to print and could not.

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.

The Prime Minister’s account. Dickon Mitchell, interview on the programme THE NARRATIVE, reported by The New Today, Grenada, 24 January 2026. Every quotation attributed to the Prime Minister on this page comes from that report, and the Coalition read the report rather than a summary of it. Third Country Deportation Watch, Grenada page, last updated 11 August 2026, for the date and place of signature, for the transfer position, for the description of the text, and for the sequence of United States measures during the same period.

The regional statement. Statement of the Caribbean Community on Third Country Nationals, read in full. The page displays no date; the monitoring project places the meeting in July 2026.

The asylum system. United States Department of State, 2024 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, Grenada, section on protection to refugees. United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Apply for asylum through UNHCR and About UNHCR Northern and Eastern Caribbean.

Treaty status, from the depositary. United Nations Treaty Collection, chapters V-2 and V-5, in neither of which Grenada appears; IV-9 for the Convention against Torture, accession 26 September 2019, with Grenada absent from the declarations section and no reservations recorded; IV-9-b for the Optional Protocol, to which Grenada is not a party; IV-5 for the First Optional Protocol to the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which Grenada is not a party. Inter-American Court of Human Rights, states accepting contentious jurisdiction. The Organization of American States tables on the American Convention were unreachable behind a bot check and are recorded as such.

Where the instrument is published. United States Department of State, Qualifying Non-binding Instruments library. The monthly bundles themselves are on a path disallowed to automated retrieval. The Coalition did not retrieve them and quotes nothing from them.

Compiled 11 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. Where a document could not be opened, this page says so rather than quoting it at second hand as though it had been read. Two formulations were changed before publication: a statement that no transfers to Grenada have occurred was replaced with a statement of what each tracker records and when it was last updated, because the two are not the same claim; and a sentence describing the regional statement as raising chain refoulement was removed, because the statement does not mention it and the gloss belongs to a monitoring project rather than to the Conference of Heads of Government. Corrections to the Coalition.