This project answers one question: which countries has a court found it unsafe to send a particular person back to, and why? Not which states send people away, and not which states agree to receive them. The countries here are the ones people were running from, and the ones a judge has accepted they cannot be made to return to.
Two other projects on this site follow the machinery of removal. States Engaging in Refoulement records the states that move people. Transit and Temporary Recipients records the states that agree to hold them. Neither answers what the person was running from, and without that the record describes logistics rather than harm.
A state can belong to more than one of the three. A country that receives people removed from somewhere else can equally be a country other people hold protection against. Those pages are listed here as well as in their own project, and nothing has been moved.
All eleven countries in this project also appear in the Third-Country Removals project, on The Countries page, flagged as destination countries where torture is documented: the countries people sent to third countries were fleeing, and where they end up when a third country sends them on.
How a country gets on this list
Not by the Coalition’s assessment of how dangerous it is. A country appears here when the Coalition’s own register of court decisions contains a matter in which a person held, or was found entitled to, protection against being returned there, or in which a court required a fear hearing before they could be sent. The register sets the membership. The Coalition then sets out what authoritative bodies have found about conditions in that country, with every source linked.
There is a second route. A country also appears here when the immigration courts’ own figures show that United States immigration judges granted asylum to its nationals. Fifteen states that receive people transferred by the United States are listed on that basis, from the Executive Office for Immigration Review’s table of asylum decisions by nationality for fiscal year 2024, generated on 10 October 2024. Sources: EOIR, asylum decisions by nationality, fiscal year 2024 · Coalition copy (PDF)
That method has a consequence worth stating plainly. This is not a list of the world’s worst places. It is a list of the countries that appear in the decisions the Coalition has collected and in the immigration courts’ own figures, and it will grow as both do. A country’s absence from it means nothing at all.
Read this before relying on any page in this project. Protection against return is granted to a person, not to a nationality. It rests on that person’s own account, their own evidence, and the conditions they would personally face. Two people of the same nationality can be decided differently, and correctly so.
These pages are a starting point for understanding what has been found about a country. They are not country-conditions evidence in anybody’s case, and they are not a substitute for it. A person’s own record governs. Nothing here should be filed as though it were proof of individual risk, and nothing here should be read as a prediction of how any particular case will be decided.
States in this project that also appear elsewhere
Twenty-one states in this project are also Transit and Temporary Recipients and keep their guides there. A state that agrees to receive people removed from somewhere else can equally be a state other people cannot lawfully be sent back to.
Through the register (six): El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Jamaica, Mexico and Rwanda. The Coalition’s register records matters in which a person held, or was found entitled to, protection against being returned to each.
Through the immigration courts’ figures (fifteen): Burundi (19), Cameroon (527), Democratic Republic of the Congo (95), Ghana (238), Liberia (10), Sierra Leone (12), Uganda (86), Belize (11), Costa Rica (4), Dominican Republic (25), Ecuador (657), Panama (17), Kosovo (85), Moldova (71) and Uzbekistan (273). The figure is the number of the country’s nationals granted asylum by United States immigration judges in fiscal year 2024. Sources: EOIR, asylum decisions by nationality, fiscal year 2024 · Coalition copy (PDF)
What each page carries
The treaty position first, because it determines what can ever be established. For several of these states the answer is that no individual can complain to any international body at all, which is why the record has to be assembled from inquiries, special procedures and country reporting rather than from judgments. Then what United Nations bodies have found. Then what independent organisations have documented, kept separate and labelled, because the two are not the same kind of thing. Then what is still being investigated, and the decisions on this site in which the country appears.
Every source is linked so a reader can go to the original. Where the Coalition has been unable to reach a document, it says so rather than quoting it at second hand.
Note on the record band at the head of each page. Its four questions were written for the receiving states and ask whether an arrangement, transfers, protection holders and onward return are reported. They are asked of every state on the site. For a state in this project they are not the operative question, and where they read Investigating that is what it means.