South Sudan

What has happened

On 3 July 2025 a Justice Department lawyer told a federal judge that South Sudan had informed the United States it would give these men temporary immigration status. He could not say whether they would be detained on arrival.

Ten months later Amnesty International reported four of them “arbitrarily detained in an undisclosed location,” and called on South Sudan to disclose their whereabouts. The United States border czar had said they were “free.”

This is the fourth receiving state the Coalition has documented and the fourth different failure. Ghana forwarded people onward. Equatorial Guinea held them until arrangements for their removal were made. Eswatini imprisoned them. South Sudan made them disappear from view.

The men were held for weeks on a United States military base in a third country before being sent to a fourth.

After the plane was turned back, they were held at Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti while the litigation proceeded. A photograph released by the Department of Homeland Security shows them on a transport plane “handcuffed and shackled at the feet, surrounded by camouflage-uniformed personnel.”

The Intercept, 7 July 2025 (Nick Turse). Djibouti detention conditions are reported separately and are not yet verified here.

The United States told the court South Sudan would grant them temporary immigration status.

A Justice Department attorney told the district court that South Sudan had so informed the United States. The attorney could not confirm whether the men would be detained on arrival.

The Intercept, 7 July 2025. To be pinned to the transcript or docket entry before publication.

Amnesty International has found four of them arbitrarily detained in an undisclosed location.

Amnesty’s urgent action of 11 May 2026 names José Manuel Rodríguez-Quiñones, Thongxay Nilakout, Kyaw Mya and Tuan Thanh Phan, records that they arrived in Juba on 4 July 2025, and describes them as “arbitrarily detained in an undisclosed location” ten months later. It calls on the South Sudanese authorities to disclose their whereabouts, to grant “unmonitored and unfettered access to their legal representatives,” to clarify the grounds of detention, and to allow access by UNHCR and IOM.

Amnesty International, AFR 65/0989/2026, “South Sudan: Further information: End four deportees’ arbitrary detention,” 11 May 2026. This is the second in a series of urgent actions on these men.

Meanwhile the United States said they were free.

The border czar, Tom Homan, said the men were “free” and “no longer in our custody.” Reporting in February 2026 recorded six of them still in South Sudanese detention, “living in a guarded complex with limited electricity and a heavy mosquito infestation,” with unclear legal status and minimal access to lawyers and families. The one South Sudanese national among the eight was reportedly released to relatives.

Lauren Wolfe, Chills, 26 February 2026. A single-journalist account: it corroborates Amnesty on the fact of continued detention but should be treated as secondary until a second source is found.

What is already before the courts

A federal judge found that the United States violated his injunction in carrying out this removal.

The finding is unqualified:

“At today’s hearing, the Court found that Defendants violated the Preliminary Injunction entered in this case by failing to provide six non-citizen class members a ‘meaningful opportunity’ to assert claims for protection under the Convention Against Torture before initiating removal to a third country.”

The Government argued that the phrase “meaningful opportunity” was ambiguous. The court answered: “To be clear, this is not one of those hard cases.”

D.V.D. v. U.S. Department of Homeland Security, No. 1:25-cv-10676-BEM (D. Mass.), ECF 118, Memorandum on Preliminary Injunction, 21 May 2025 (Murphy, J.). Read in full from the court’s own filing.

The notice was measured in hours, and none of them were business hours.

“Giving every credit to Defendants’ account, the non-citizens at issue had fewer than 24 hours’ notice, and zero business hours’ notice, before being put on a plane and sent to a country as to which the U.S. Department of State issues the following warning: ‘Do not travel to South Sudan due to crime, kidnapping, and armed conflict.’”

The court added that “further facts regarding the unavailability of information, the hurried and confused notice that the individuals received, language barriers, and attorney access compound and confirm” the finding, and that “no reasonable interpretation of the Court’s Preliminary Injunction could endorse yesterday’s events.”

ECF 118. The travel advisory quoted is the State Department’s own, dated 8 March 2025.

The court then wrote down what the law requires before a third-country removal, in terms.

Every removal to a third country “must be preceded by written notice to both the non-citizen and the non-citizen’s counsel in a language the non-citizen can understand.” After notice, “the individual must be given a meaningful opportunity, and a minimum of ten days, to raise a fear-based claim for CAT protection prior to removal.” If reasonable fear is shown, the Government must move to reopen. If it is not, the person must have “a meaningful opportunity, and a minimum of fifteen days” to seek reopening.

ECF 118. This is the clearest statement by any court of the process a third-country removal requires.

The same order closed the delegation loophole in advance.

“no Defendant may avoid their duty to follow the Preliminary Injunction by involving or ceding responsibility to any other person.”

The injunction was expressly extended to officers, agents, servants, employees, attorneys, anyone acting in concert, and anyone with notice of it.

ECF 118, citing Fed. R. Civ. P. 65(d)(2).

ICE’s own sworn declaration shows a third-country designation made without the statutory predicate.

One man on the plane, a national of Burma, was “selected for removal to South Sudan on the flight at issue due to his egregious criminal history and the fact that Burma has historically been recalcitrant in the acceptance of the return of its nationals.”

Then this, in the next paragraph of the same declaration:

“Upon further investigation after contact from [his] counsel, it was realized that [he] was in fact in possession of a travel document to Burma. Thereafter, it was decided that he would instead be removed to Burma.”

Under 8 U.S.C. § 1231(b)(2), a residual third country is available only where removal to the countries earlier in the statutory sequence is impracticable, inadvisable or impossible. He held a travel document to his own country. Counsel had to point it out.

Declaration of Marcos D. Charles, Acting Assistant Director for Field Operations, ICE ERO, ECF 125, sworn 22 May 2025 under 28 U.S.C. § 1746.

The court asked about chain refoulement. The Government’s answer defined the safeguard out of existence for these men.

The court ordered the Government to address news reports of a statement by South Sudan’s police spokesperson, Maj. Gen. James Monday Enoka, that arriving migrants “would be investigated and ‘redeported to their correct country’ if found not to be South Sudanese,” and whether that implicated the prohibition on chain refoulement.

ICE answered that none of the men on the plane held withholding of removal under the Immigration and Nationality Act or withholding or deferral under the regulations implementing Article 3 of the Convention against Torture, to any country including their own. “Therefore, based on my understanding, the principle of ‘chain refoulment’ does not apply to them.”

That is the Government stating its own position: onward removal is a legal problem only for people who already hold protection. For everyone else, the safeguard is the notice and the fear screening that this removal did not provide.

ECF 121 (order); Declaration of Marcos D. Charles, ECF 124-2, sworn 22 May 2025.

The first days

This is the thinnest practical layer on the site, and the Coalition would rather publish it thin than pad it.

South Sudan has a Human Rights Commission with an express constitutional power to visit police jails, prisons and related facilities. It has no website, no published address, no telephone number, no email address, and it is not accredited by the Global Alliance of National Human Rights Institutions. The Coalition could find no way to contact it. Its bar association has no verifiable presence beyond social media. There is no route by which an individual can complain to the United Nations Committee against Torture or go to the African Court, and South Sudan has never been reviewed by the Committee at all.

What exists and can actually be reached is the International Committee of the Red Cross in Juba, which visits detainees, and the United Nations refugee agency, which runs hotlines seven days a week. Those two are the page.

Who is reachable in South Sudan

Two cautions on names. The South Sudan Human Rights Commission is the national institution; the Commission on Human Rights in South Sudan is a separate investigative body of the United Nations Human Rights Council. They are not the same and should not be approached as though they were. The South Sudan Law Society is a non-governmental organisation, not the bar association. The Coalition could find no official website, address, telephone number or email for the South Sudan Bar Association, and publishes none rather than one from a directory. The Ministry of Justice website carries an expired security certificate and anyone directed there will see a browser warning.

There is a court you can file in, and you have two months

Read this first if you or someone you know is detained here now.

This country is a member of the East African Community. Its Court of Justice, sitting at Arusha, is open to any person resident in a Partner State. You do not need this country to have signed anything extra. You do not have to go through the local courts first.

But the time limit is two months, and it runs from the day the detention began, not the day it ends.

Article 30(2) of the Treaty establishing the East African Community requires proceedings to be brought “within two months of the enactment, publication, directive, decision or action complained of, or in the absence thereof, of the day in which it came to the knowledge of the complainant.”

The Court’s Appellate Division has held that this is absolute. In a case brought by men who had been seized in one country, taken to another and were still in detention when they filed, the Court said:

“The Court finds the Respondents’ argument that when the act complained of is a continuous detention, the starting date for computation of its limitation time is the day when it ceases is erroneous… nowhere does the Treaty provide any power to the Court to extend, to condone, to waive, or to modify the prescribed time limit for any reason (including for ‘continuing violations’).”

“the starting date of an act complained of under Article 30(2), (including the detention of a complainant), is not the day the act ends, but the day it is first effected.”

Their case was struck out while they were still held. If you have been detained for more than two months, this door has probably closed. If you have been detained for less than two months, it is open today and will not be open for long.

The one narrow exception, and it is about concealment.

Where a state hid the detention, the Court has allowed a case to proceed because the state could not show when the applicant or their family learned of it. That is a point about who must prove what, not a doctrine that a continuing detention restarts the clock. If your detention was concealed from your family, say so, and say when they found out, because the date they found out may be the date that counts.

What you can and cannot ask the Court to decide.

This matters, and getting it wrong loses the case at the door. The Court has no human rights jurisdiction as such. The protocol that was supposed to give it one, under Article 27(2) of the Treaty, has never been agreed.

What the Court can do is interpret the Treaty, and it has held that a state breaches the Treaty when it breaks the rule of law. The obligations to use are Article 6(d), which binds Partner States to good governance including “adherence to the principles of democracy, the rule of law” and “the recognition, promotion and protection of human and peoples rights in accordance with the provisions of the African Charter”, and Article 7(2), by which states undertake to abide by “the maintenance of universally accepted standards of human rights”.

The Court put its own position this way:

“While the Court will not assume jurisdiction to adjudicate on human rights disputes, it will not abdicate from exercising its jurisdiction of interpretation under Article 27(1) merely because the Reference includes allegation of human rights violation.”

So the claim must be framed as a breach of the Treaty, not as a human rights violation. A case pleaded the other way round is likely to fail on jurisdiction without anyone looking at what happened to you.

One more limit, and it bites on people transferred here.

The Court has protected a person turned back at an airport and briefly detained, but on the basis of free movement rights that belong to citizens of Partner States. It said expressly that the national immigration law remains applicable “where citizens of other nations, except the Partner States, are concerned.” A person transferred here from outside East Africa cannot use that route and has only the rule of law argument under Articles 6(d) and 7(2).

Treaty for the Establishment of the East African Community, Articles 6(d), 7(2), 27, 30 and 38, from the text published by the East African Legislative Assembly. Attorney General of the Republic of Uganda v Omar Awadh and 6 Others, Appeal No. 2 of 2012, Appellate Division, 15 April 2013. Attorney General of the Republic of Kenya v Independent Medical Legal Unit, Appeal No. 1 of 2011, 15 March 2012. Katabazi and 21 Others v Secretary General of the East African Community, Reference No. 1 of 2007, 1 November 2007. Samuel Mukira Mohochi v Attorney General of Uganda, Reference No. 5 of 2011, 17 May 2013. Attorney General of Rwanda v Plaxeda Rugumba, Appeal No. 1 of 2012, 1 June 2012. Checked 8 September 2026. The Coalition is reading these provisions and judgments, not advising on them, and a lawyer admitted in the region should settle how a particular case is framed.

What the judgment is worth if you win.

Article 38(3) requires a Partner State to take the measures needed to implement a judgment “without delay”, and Article 33(2) gives the Court’s decisions precedence over national court decisions on the same matter. Article 44 provides for execution, but only of judgments imposing a pecuniary obligation, and only through the ordinary civil procedure of the state concerned. There is no body that monitors compliance and no sanction if a state ignores the Court. The Coalition could find no published figure for how often states comply.

Which complaint routes are open

None. South Sudan is the most closed state in this project on every measure the Coalition has checked.

Closed: individual complaint to the United Nations Committee against Torture.

South Sudan acceded to the Convention against Torture on 30 April 2015. It has never made the declaration under article 22. The Committee has no competence to receive a complaint against it.

Closed: going to the African Court.

South Sudan signed the Protocol establishing the African Court on 24 January 2013 and has never ratified it. It is not a party, so no declaration under article 34(6) is possible.

Not exercised: preventive inspection under the Optional Protocol.

South Sudan acceded to the Optional Protocol on the same day it acceded to the Convention, 30 April 2015. Eleven years later there is no national preventive mechanism, and South Sudan is on the Subcommittee’s list of states not complying with that obligation. The United Nations Subcommittee on Prevention of Torture has never visited South Sudan.

South Sudan has never been reviewed by the Committee against Torture.

Its initial report was due on 30 May 2016. It has never been submitted. There are no concluding observations on South Sudan of any kind, and no review is scheduled.

One point of history, because it is sometimes assumed otherwise. South Sudan became independent in 2011 and did not succeed to any predecessor state’s position: Sudan signed the Convention against Torture in 1986 and never ratified it, so there was nothing to succeed to. South Sudan’s obligations begin with its own accession in 2015.

Treaty positions from the United Nations Treaty Collection, chapters IV-9 and IV-9-b, the African Union depositary list, and the United Nations Treaty Body Database, all checked 8 September 2026. Subcommittee non-compliance status from its own annual reports.

What this page still does not know

How to contact the South Sudan Human Rights Commission. No address, telephone number or email could be found, and it has no website. Whether it has ever exercised its constitutional power to visit places of detention, and whether it publishes the periodical reports the Constitution requires of it. How to reach the South Sudan Bar Association, or whether it is functioning. Where the people transferred to South Sudan are now, and under what status. Whether the International Committee of the Red Cross has seen any of them. And a working telephone number for the International Organization for Migration in Juba, the one it publishes appearing to carry the wrong country code.

This page is thin because the country is. If you can fill any of it, the Coalition wants to hear from you.

The dated record

Every entry below is a fact with a source.

What is not established

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

A caution that governs this whole record. ICE swore that none of the eight held withholding of removal or protection under the Convention against Torture, to any country. Unlike Ghana and Equatorial Guinea, this is not a case of people being sent past protection they already held. The violation the court found was procedural: they were denied a meaningful opportunity to make a claim about South Sudan. The site must not describe it as anything else.

Numbers and dates to close. How many remain detained: six in January 2026, four in May 2026. Whether the difference is release, transfer or reporting. The arrival date, 4 or 5 July 2025. The nationalities, on which sources differ: one list gives Cuba, Laos, Mexico, Myanmar, Pakistan, South Korea, Vietnam and South Sudan. The Djibouti conditions, which are reported but not yet verified here. The Justice Department’s statement about temporary immigration status, which should be pinned to a transcript rather than to a news report. And the first Amnesty urgent action in the series, which I have not yet opened.