What an Alert means

An Alert marks a state from which a risk arises to people moved under a third-country removal arrangement, where a reliable, identified source reports that risk. It attaches to any state that produces the risk, whether that state receives people, moves them across its territory, or sends them. It is a warning, not a verdict. It records what has been reported, names the source behind every trigger, and says plainly whether any authority has yet ruled on it.

This page sets out the test, so that any reader, including a government that carries a designation, can check whether it has been applied correctly.

Why the arrangement itself counts

These transfers share a set of features that create risk before anything else is known. People are moved by force, in handcuffs and shackles, to a state that is not their own, where they have no family, no language and no standing. They have no say in the destination. The receiving state has agreed to take them under an arrangement that is often unpublished, and in several cases has been paid to do so.

The Convention against Torture requires the sending state to assess what will foreseeably happen to a person after arrival. Where that assessment was never made, or was made categorically rather than person by person, the risk is not speculative.

An Alert therefore does not wait for harm to be proven. It marks the risk while the question is open.

Which states carry an Alert

Any state from which the risk arises. No state is exempt. Most of the states designated here receive people transferred from the United States. One does not: the United States, which sends them.

What differs between them is the page a designation links to, not the designation itself. A country guide answers what a person actually finds in the country they were sent to, and that is a question a sending state cannot answer, because nobody lands there. Those states are documented in Where the Prohibition Is Being Broken, which records what a government did rather than what a person will find on arrival. The test for evidence is identical in both places.

A state’s reputation neither designates it nor spares it. Why a state with a strong reputation for defending human rights can nonetheless produce risk, and produce it in a particular way, is set out in that section.

The two grounds

A state is designated where a reliable, identified source reports a risk on either ground. A state may carry one, or both.

Ground 1. Torture or ill-treatment by state officials

Torture, or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, by police, military, prison or immigration personnel. It also covers conduct by others carried out at the instigation of, or with the consent or acquiescence of, a public official, which is the definition the Convention against Torture uses.

Ground 2. Refoulement

Exposure to return to a place where a person faces persecution or torture, or the documented return of people holding international protection. It includes chain refoulement, meaning onward transfer to a further state from which return then follows, because the Committee against Torture reads article 3 of the Convention as reaching not only the state a person is sent to but any state to which that person may subsequently be sent.

What counts as a source

Two kinds of source can carry a designation. The difference is recorded on every country page and in the table below, so a reader always knows which one a designation rests on.

Findings, which the Coalition treats as settled unless overturned

• A court of competent jurisdiction, in any country
• A United Nations treaty body, special procedure or working group
• A regional human rights body, such as the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights or the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights
• A national human rights institution
• The state’s own official submissions to an international body

The last of these is deliberate. A government’s own admission, made to a body it is answerable to, is the most probative evidence available about that government.

Reports, which are enough to raise an Alert and are labelled as reports

• Established human rights organisations with a documented method, such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the International Committee of the Red Cross
• Established news organisations reporting first-hand, or naming their sourcing
• United Nations operational agencies and country teams
• Bar associations, medical bodies and other professional bodies
• The terms of the transfer arrangement itself, where these have been published
• First-hand accounts from people transferred, or from their lawyers, where the person is identified to the Coalition

A report is not a finding, and this site never calls one a finding. But a report from a source that can be named and checked is enough to warn people who may be sent to that state, which is what an Alert is for.

What does not trigger an Alert

An Alert still needs a source a reader can go and check. These do not qualify.

Anonymous or unattributed claims. Material from a source the Coalition cannot identify does not carry a designation, however plausible it sounds. Where the Coalition holds such material it may act on it privately, but it does not publish it as a trigger.

A single social media post with no identifiable author and no corroboration.

Anything the Coalition cannot trace to a document, a named organisation or a named person.

The Coalition’s own inference, where no source has reported the thing at all. The Coalition may say what it concludes, and it says so in its own voice, marked as its view. It does not convert its conclusions into triggers.

A general reputation is not a trigger either. What is required is a report or a finding, from one of the sources above, bearing on the safety of people transferred or on the state’s treatment of people in its custody.

How an Alert is written

Every trigger is dated, quoted, and linked to the primary document. If the Coalition has not opened the document, the trigger is not published.

Where a trigger is a report rather than a finding, the page says so in those words. The Coalition does not describe a report as a finding, and does not describe a finding as merely a report.

An Alert names institutions. It names an individual only where an authority’s finding attaches to that person, or where the person made the statement attributed to them on the record. No individual is named as a perpetrator of torture, because in none of the designations now in force has an authority made such a finding against a named person. If one does, that will be said plainly, with the finding attached.

Where the burden lies

The Coalition does not treat the absence of a finding as evidence of safety, and it does not wait for one before warning people who may be sent to a state.

A state that carries a designation is better placed than anyone else to show that the concern is unfounded. It holds the custody registers, the arrival and departure records, the medical records of anyone it received, and the text of its own arrangement with the United States. None of that is available to the Coalition, and most of it is available to nobody outside that government.

So the Coalition invites any designated state to provide four things: the text of the arrangement, the number of people received and their current status, access for an independent monitor, and a named official who will answer questions. Where a state provides them, the designation is reviewed on what they show, and the response is published in full alongside the designation, whether or not it changes the outcome.

Review and removal

Each designation carries a stated review point: a proceeding, a disclosure or a decision whose outcome would bear on it. A designation is lifted when the ground that triggered it no longer holds, and the removal is recorded on the country’s page along with the reason. A designation is not a permanent judgment on a country, and it is not intended to survive the facts that produced it.

The designations now in force

Every state below carries an Alert. The table records what each designation rests on, so a reader can see which are supported by a finding from a court or a United Nations body and which rest on the arrangement and the conduct documented on that state page. Where the authority column reads Investigating, the Coalition is still looking. That is a statement about the record, not a finding that the risk is absent.

If you think a designation is wrong

Write to the Coalition and say which trigger is mistaken and why. If a trigger cannot be supported by the document cited for it, it will be withdrawn and the withdrawal published. If a designation rests on a fact that has since changed, the Coalition wants to know that too.

The Coalition publishes its corrections. A designation that cannot survive being checked should not be published, and one that has been checked and stands is worth more than one that has not.