Uganda

What has happened

Uganda received eight people. In the same period, thousands of asylum claims belonging to non-Ugandans were closed out on the basis that Uganda was available to receive them.

The arrangement did its work without the flights. An asylum claim can be extinguished by the existence of a third country whether or not anyone is ever sent there.

What Ugandan officials confirmed, against what the lawyers said.

Ministry of Internal Affairs spokesperson Simon Mundeyi and the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs both confirmed eight arrivals, “seven men and one woman from six African countries, including Mauritania, Angola, Ethiopia, Mali, Togo and Guinea,” classified as asylum seekers. The Uganda Law Society said twelve. One Ugandan outlet reported twenty across two flights. No other source corroborates a second flight.

What happened to the eight, on a single source.

Third Country Deportation Watch reports that as of July 2026, “two of the eight individuals have been granted refugee status in Uganda, one fled the country, four returned to their home countries and one is awaiting repatriation.”

If that stands up it is the most significant fact in the Uganda file: of eight people transferred because they could not be returned home, four had returned home within three months. It is single-sourced and needs a second source before publication. No source states where the eight were taken or whether they were detained.

What the record says about Uganda itself

The pretermission figure, and exactly how far it can be taken.

Third Country Deportation Watch, a joint project of Refugees International and Human Rights First, states that “between December 2025 and June 2026, 2727 non-Ugandan asylum seekers had their cases pretermitted and were designated for removal first to Uganda under the ACA,” attributing the count to immigration court data held by Mobile Pathways.

The tracker publishes a nationality breakdown alongside the total, covering 38 countries and led by Guinea (659), Senegal (442), Mauritania (342), Cameroon (256) and Ethiopia (138). It sums to 2,523, not 2,727. The Coalition does not know what the remaining 204 are, and the tracker does not say.

The underlying data cannot be inspected. Mobile Pathways publishes dashboards rather than a dataset, including one described as covering respondents “ordered removed to a country that differs from their nationality under formal ACA agreements or other agreements.” Its case-level tool requires an account, and it publishes no methodology note. So the figure is attributable to named organisations relying on a named source, and it is not independently checkable by a reader.

What is checkable is the surrounding picture, and it is consistent. Joseph Gunther and Brandon Marrow, publishing as bklg on 16 March 2026 from the Executive Office for Immigration Review’s own FOIA library, current through 28 February 2026, found that immigration judges granted more than 23,000 DHS pretermission motions between November 2025 and February 2026, roughly three times the number they denied. They found that over 22 per cent of asylum applicants with February 2026 hearings faced a pretermission motion, rising to 36 per cent at individual hearings. They found pretermissions outside any asylum cooperative agreement rising from 29 cases in March 2025 to more than 1,300 in each of January and February 2026. And they found at least 59 non-Ugandan children, some as young as two, ordered removed to Uganda after pretermission motions.

New York Focus, drawing on the same researchers, reports that of roughly 2,350 African asylum seekers with hearings in New York between December and February, “just under 50 percent were subject to motions to abandon their cases.”

Third Country Deportation Watch, Uganda page, last updated 30 July 2026. Joseph Gunther and Brandon Marrow, “No Hearing Necessary,” bklg, 16 March 2026. Mobile Pathways, Immigration Court Data. Correction: an earlier version of this page said the nationality breakdown summed to 1,935 and that the compilation could not be opened. Both were wrong. The breakdown sums to 2,523 and the tracker is public.

The legal profession in the region called it what it is.

The Uganda Law Society and the East Africa Law Society called the transfers “an undignified, harrowing and dehumanising process,” their vice-president adding: “We view it as but one gust from the ill winds of transnational repression that are blowing across our world.” They pledged a challenge in the Ugandan courts; no filed case was found.

The Committee against Torture examined Uganda in 2022 and found what matters here.

CAT/C/UGA/CO/2, adopted 22 November 2022. On torture: “The Committee is deeply concerned by reports that torture and ill-treatment continue to be widespread and frequently practiced in Uganda.” It recorded that the police “still uses the Penal Code Act Cap 120, recording cases of torture as assault,” so that “access to justice by victims is thereby limited,” and noted “the reluctance of victims and witnesses to report torture to competent authorities as they fear reprisals.”

On unlawful detention sites: the Committee “remains concerned at reports indicating that this practice still takes place in Uganda” and reiterated that Uganda “should abolish the use of ‘ungazetted’ or unauthorized places of detention or ‘safe houses’.”

On non-refoulement, and this is the passage that bears directly on Uganda as a receiving state: the Committee “regrets the lack of information available on the number of extraditions carried out during the reporting period, the number of instances and the types of cases in which the State party has offered or accepted diplomatic assurances or guarantees, and on the measures taken in such cases with regard to subsequent monitoring.” It recommended that Uganda ensure “procedural safeguards against refoulement are in place” and “effective remedies … including reviews of rejections by an independent judicial body.”

Uganda is outside two of the three international safeguards.

The Committee recommended in 2022 that Uganda “consider ratifying the Optional Protocol” and “consider making the declaration under article 22 … recognizing the competence of the Committee to receive and consider communications.” Both recommendations remain outstanding. Uganda submitted its second periodic report sixteen years late.

What is already before the courts

No United States court has designated Uganda a safe third country, whatever Uganda’s foreign ministry says.

One research institute reports Uganda’s foreign ministry claiming that “a US judge approved the deportations on the grounds that America had designated Uganda as a safe third country.” No such decision exists, and safe-country designation is not a judicial function. Present it as a government assertion and say that no supporting decision is in the public record.

The Uganda agreement is squarely at issue in U.T. v. Bondi, No. 1:20-cv-00116-EGS (D.D.C.), the challenge to the Asylum Cooperative Agreement framework, in which no merits holding has yet issued.

The first days

Uganda has something no other country in this project has. Its Human Rights Commission can order a detained person released. That power is in the Constitution, it is enforceable as a court order, and an appeal from it lies to the High Court.

It also has a limit that may matter here more than anywhere else, and this page sets the two out together rather than leading with the good half. Everything else is thinner: Uganda is not a party to the Optional Protocol at all, has never accepted individual complaints to the Committee against Torture, and cannot be taken to the African Court by an individual.

Who is reachable in Uganda

The Uganda Law Society is Uganda’s bar association, established under the Uganda Law Society Act of 1956, CAP 276. Its own contact page could not be reached by the Coalition at any point, and no telephone number, address or email is published here rather than one taken from a third-party directory. Its site is uls.or.ug.

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

The commission can order release, and there is a limit on the face of the Constitution.

Article 53(2) is quoted in full because the whole of this page turns on it:

“The commission may, if satisfied that there has been an infringement of a human right or freedom, order— (a) the release of a detained or restricted person; (b) payment of compensation; or (c) any other legal remedy or redress.”

Article 53(1) gives it the powers of a court: to issue summonses, to question any person, to require disclosure of information, and to commit persons for contempt of its orders. An appeal from an order lies to the High Court under article 53(3).

Article 53(4) is the limit:

“The commission shall not investigate— (a) any matter which is pending before a court or judicial tribunal; (b) a matter involving the relations or dealings between the Government and the Government of any foreign State or international organisation; or (c) a matter relating to the exercise of the prerogative of mercy.”

The Coalition sets that out because a transfer arrangement between Uganda and another government is capable of falling within paragraph (b), and a person relying on this page is entitled to know that before they write. The commission has not been asked to decide the point so far as the Coalition can establish. Whether the exclusion bites on a complaint about a person’s own detention, as opposed to a complaint about the arrangement itself, is not settled here and is not for this page to settle.

Constitution of the Republic of Uganda 1995, articles 51 to 58, read from the official text published by the Judiciary of Uganda, checked 8 September 2026. The Coalition sets out the text and does not interpret it.

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

Uganda acceded to the Convention against Torture on 3 November 1986. It made the declaration under article 21 on 19 December 2001, accepting inter-state communications, and conditioned it on reciprocity. It has never made the declaration under article 22. The article 21 declaration gives an individual nothing: it allows one state to complain about another, not a person to complain at all.

Closed: preventive inspection under the Optional Protocol.

Uganda is not a party to the Optional Protocol and has never signed it. The United Nations Subcommittee on Prevention of Torture has no mandate to visit Uganda, and no national preventive mechanism is owed. It is one of only two countries in this project in that position.

Closed: going to the African Court.

Uganda ratified the Protocol establishing the African Court on 16 February 2001 and deposited the instrument on 6 June 2001. It has never made the declaration under article 34(6), so neither an individual nor an organisation can file directly.

Where the Committee against Torture last said anything.

The Committee adopted concluding observations on 25 November 2022, CAT/C/UGA/CO/2. Unusually among the countries in this project, Uganda’s next report is not overdue: the third periodic report falls due on 25 November 2026, and the Committee issued a list of issues prior to reporting on 22 December 2025.

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.

What this page still does not know

Whether the Uganda Human Rights Commission has ever been asked to order the release of a person transferred from another country, and what it did. Whether article 53(4)(b) has ever been applied to a transfer arrangement. Where the people transferred to Uganda are now, and under what status. Working contact details for the commission, since its own published numbers are malformed and do not match the government portal’s. Contact details for the Uganda Law Society, whose site the Coalition could not reach. And whether the International Committee of the Red Cross has seen anyone in this group among the 274 detainees it followed individually in 2025.

If you know any of these, 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.

How many were transferred and when. The 2,727 figure and its underlying data. Where the eight were taken and whether they were detained. The reported outcomes as of July 2026. The operating procedures under the agreement. Any US payment. Whether the Uganda Law Society challenge was ever filed.