The Countries

Thirty-five states are recorded as having agreed to receive, or as having received, people removed from the United States who are not their nationals. The monitoring project counted twenty-six as having actually received them as of early August 2026, and at least one more has received people since, Liberia, on 20 August 2026. The monitoring organisations describe more than 23,000 transfers and more than $49 million in United States funding connected to the arrangements. This section profiles each state: the arrangement as reported, the transfers as reported, the state’s human rights record as documented by the United States Department of State and United Nations bodies, and what the reported outcomes show. After the regional lists, a fourth list names the eleven countries the people transferred were fleeing, flagged as destination countries where torture is documented.

How to read the labels

Torture record means the State Department or a United Nations body has documented torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment by state officials, security forces or prison personnel. Custodial abuse means documented mistreatment in custody short of a finding of systematic official torture. No finding cited means the report relied on contains no finding of official torture. It is a statement about the absence of a finding, not a finding that the state is safe, and it does not resolve the question for any individual. UN on this programme means United Nations special procedures have addressed the United States transfers to that state specifically, rather than the state’s record generally. Has received means at least one transfer is publicly documented.

Every profile also carries one label on refoulement, because that is the question the whole programme turns on. Refoulement documented means a source named in the profile records that people transferred to that state were afterwards returned to the country they had left, or moved on towards it. Refoulement risk means no such return is documented, but the terms of the arrangement, the receiving state’s own description of its role, or the reported conditions make onward return a live question. Refoulement: record not available means the Coalition has located no evidence either way. It is a statement about what we have been able to find, not a statement that nobody was returned, and for most of these states nobody has yet looked.

Two further flags concern the countries people flee. Destination: torture documented marks the eleven countries listed under Destination countries: countries United States immigration judges have protected people from being returned to, where a United Nations body has documented torture, and where people sent on from a third country end up. Also a country people flee marks a third country that is itself a country people hold protection against, either through a matter in the Coalition’s register or because United States immigration judges granted asylum to its nationals.

Two limits apply to every profile. The absence of work authorisation is not itself refoulement, and detention is not itself torture. They become significant in combination: where a state gives a transferred person no lawful path to remain, no authorisation to work, no protection status, confinement, and release only on agreement to return home, the description of the transfer as resettlement becomes difficult to sustain.

Where the information comes from

The arrangement and transfer details in each profile are drawn from the organisations monitoring the programme, principally Human Rights First, Refugees International, and the Third Country Deportations tracker maintained by the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, together with reporting by the Associated Press, Reuters, CBS News, Al Jazeera, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. Each profile says “reported” where that is the basis. The human rights record in each profile is drawn from the State Department’s Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, linked for 2023 and 2024, and from the concluding observations of the Committee against Torture and other United Nations bodies, which can be found for each state in the treaty body database. The 2024 series of State Department reports, released on 12 August 2025, was restructured and shortened; Human Rights Watch and members of Congress have criticised the resulting reports for omitting or minimising categories of abuse recorded in earlier editions. The 2023 reports are considerably more detailed on torture, detention and police conduct, and the profiles rely on them. The earlier findings have not been withdrawn, and the United Nations findings stand independently of both.

General sources: USCRI Third Country Deportations tracker · Human Rights Watch, 23 September 2025 · State Department 2023 reports (index) · State Department 2024 reports (index) · OHCHR treaty body database.

What the profiles show together

The receiving states are not alike, and the difference is the point. Roughly a third carry no cited finding of official torture. One, Uganda, is reported to have granted refugee status to two of eight transferees. Others are reported to have told arrivals that they could not remain and would be returned, to have held transferees in detention until they agreed to go home, or to have returned every member of a cohort to the country of nationality. A person’s position therefore depends on which state he is sent to and on what that state does with him, which is why the law described in this project turns on the conditions on arrival rather than on the fact of transfer.

What the profiles do not show, and should

Reading the country profiles one at a time hides the thing they have in common. The Coalition checked, against the depositary’s own records rather than any summary, which international routes are open to a person held in each of the nine African states examined most closely: Sierra Leone, South Sudan, the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Liberia, Uganda, Burundi, Cabo Verde and Rwanda.

All nine have closed the direct route to the African Court.

Four never ratified the Protocol establishing the Court and are not parties: Sierra Leone, South Sudan, the Central African Republic and Liberia. Cabo Verde has never signed it at all. Three ratified but have never made the declaration under article 34(6) that lets an individual or a non-governmental organisation file directly: Burundi, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda. Rwanda made that declaration on 22 January 2013 and withdrew it, the withdrawal taking effect on 1 March 2017.

An individual can reach the Court only indirectly, if the African Commission refers the matter.

Eight of the nine have closed the Committee against Torture.

Only Burundi has made the declaration under article 22 of the Convention against Torture accepting complaints from individuals, on 10 June 2003. In the other eight the Committee has no competence to receive a complaint at all.

Uganda is worth stating precisely, because it is easily misread. It made the declaration under article 21 on 19 December 2001, which accepts complaints from other states, conditioned on reciprocity. That gives a detained person nothing.

Preventive inspection exists in three of the nine.

Sierra Leone signed the Optional Protocol in 2003 and never ratified it. Uganda is neither party nor signatory. In both, the United Nations Subcommittee on Prevention of Torture has no mandate at all and no national mechanism is owed.

Of the seven that are parties, only Cabo Verde and Rwanda have designated a national mechanism. Liberia has been a party for twenty-two years without one, the Democratic Republic of the Congo for sixteen, Burundi for thirteen, South Sudan for eleven, and the Central African Republic for ten. All five are on the Subcommittee’s list of states not complying with that obligation.

The Subcommittee has visited four of them: Liberia twice, in 2010 and 2018; Cabo Verde in 2019; the Democratic Republic of the Congo in December 2024; and Rwanda in October 2017, where the visit was suspended and then terminated in June 2018, the only termination in the Subcommittee’s history. It has never visited South Sudan, the Central African Republic or Burundi.

What that adds up to.

For seven of the nine, every one of these three routes is closed. Burundi has one open, the individual complaint, while having no national mechanism and never having received a visit. Cabo Verde is the reverse: the strongest preventive machinery in the group, no complaint route at all, and no report submitted to the Committee against Torture since it acceded in 1992.

The Coalition sets this out because the arrangements under which people are transferred are made with states chosen by the sending government, and the question of what a transferred person can do about it afterwards is answered, in most of these countries, by nothing.

Compiled 8 September 2026 from the United Nations Treaty Collection, chapters IV-9 and IV-9-b, the depositary’s own record; the United Nations Treaty Body Database; the annual reports of the Subcommittee on Prevention of Torture; and the African Union’s depositary list for the Protocol establishing the African Court. Sixteen of the eighteen treaty actions by these nine states are accessions rather than ratifications, and two widely used secondary tables carry date errors, so the Coalition cites the depositary and not those tables.

But there is a court in eight of the nine, and it is not the African Court.

The paragraphs above are about the African Court, and read alone they would leave a false impression. Eight of these nine states belong to a sub-regional community whose court is open to individuals directly, with no declaration required and no need to exhaust local remedies first. The Coalition set this out late and corrects it here.

Sierra Leone, Liberia and Cabo Verde are members of the Economic Community of West African States. Its Community Court of Justice takes applications from individuals under article 10(d) of the 2005 Supplementary Protocol, requires no exhaustion of local remedies, and attaches no nationality condition: a Belgian national deported from Ghana and a Venezuelan national detained in Cabo Verde have both succeeded there. Its weakness is compliance, which the Court’s own President put at about 22 per cent in June 2025.

Uganda, Burundi, Rwanda, South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo are members of the East African Community. Its Court of Justice takes references from any person resident in a Partner State, again with no exhaustion requirement. Its weaknesses are three: a two-month limit that runs from the day a detention begins and cannot be extended for any reason, no human rights jurisdiction as such so a claim must be pleaded as a breach of the Treaty, and free movement protections that reach only citizens of Partner States.

The Central African Republic has neither. It has not ratified the African Court Protocol, the Central African community’s court does not function, and the monetary community’s court has no human rights jurisdiction. It is the only one of the nine with no court outside its own borders.

The pattern worth noticing is not that every door is shut. It is which doors are shut where, and that the two states with the most functional machinery, Cabo Verde and Burundi, have received among the fewest people.

And the four other African states on this page do not follow the same pattern.

Ghana is the exception to everything above. It deposited the declaration under article 34(6) of the African Court Protocol on 10 March 2011 and has never withdrawn it, so an individual can go directly to the African Court against Ghana. Seven African states have that declaration in force and Ghana is the only receiving state among them. Ghana is also an ECOWAS member, so both courts are open at once. No other country on this page has two.

Cameroon and Equatorial Guinea are in the same position as the Central African Republic, for slightly different reasons. Cameroon ratified the African Court Protocol in 2015 but never made the article 34(6) declaration; Equatorial Guinea signed in 1998 and never ratified at all. Both belong to the Central African community, whose Court of Justice has never been constituted in the forty-three years since the treaty created it and was not on the agenda when the community’s justice ministers met in July 2026, and to the Central African monetary community, whose court is real but has consistently refused jurisdiction over member states’ domestic acts. Neither has a court outside its borders.

Eswatini had one and lost it. The SADC Tribunal took cases from individuals until the Community suspended it in 2010 and 2011 and resolved in 2012 to replace it with a body confined to disputes between states. The replacement protocol of 2014 does not mention individuals anywhere in its text, is not in force, and Eswatini did not sign it. Eswatini never ratified the African Court Protocol either. What remains is the COMESA Court at Lusaka, whose treaty lets any resident of a member state challenge that state’s acts as an infringement of the treaty, but which requires local remedies to be exhausted first and has never in about forty-five decisions decided anything about detention, deportation or expulsion. That is untested, not open.

Africa

The Americas and the Caribbean

Europe, Central Asia and the Pacific

Destination countries: where people face torture

These eleven countries are not third countries. They are the countries the people sent to third countries were fleeing. In each one, United States immigration judges have granted people protection against being returned there, and a United Nations body has documented torture there. Each entry quotes that finding and links to it.

They are on this page for two reasons. A person’s protection against one of these countries is the reason the government looks for a third country at all. And when a third country sends the person on, this is where the person ends up. The record shows it happening: Ghana deported Nigerians to Nigeria within twenty-four hours of arrival and sent a Gambian man back to The Gambia although an immigration judge had granted him withholding of removal, and all 252 Venezuelan men held at the CECOT prison in El Salvador were moved on to Venezuela on 18 July 2025. Sources: Third Country Deportation Watch, Ghana · El Salvador guide

Each country carries the flag Destination: torture documented. The flag rests on the United Nations finding quoted in its entry. Protection is still granted to a person, not to a nationality, so nothing in these entries is evidence in anyone’s individual case. Each name links to the country’s full page in Countries Named in Protection Orders.

Africa

The Americas

Asia and Europe

Third countries that are also countries people flee

Some of the third countries are themselves countries United States immigration courts protect people from. In fiscal year 2024, immigration judges granted asylum to nationals of twenty-one of the thirty-five states on this page. All twenty-one are now also listed in Countries Named in Protection Orders, and each entry above carries the flag Also a country people flee. For six of them, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Jamaica, Mexico and Rwanda, the Coalition’s register also records a matter in which a person held, or was found entitled to, protection against being returned there.

Source: Executive Office for Immigration Review, Adjudication Statistics, Asylum Decisions by Nationality, fiscal year 2024, data generated 10 October 2024. Links: EOIR, asylum decisions by nationality, fiscal year 2024 · Coalition copy (PDF) The table counts grants of asylum in immigration court only; withholding of removal and protection under the Convention against Torture are not counted in it. EOIR does not report numbers lower than four, and the other fourteen states on this page had fewer than four grants or none recorded. As of 2 October 2026 this table is no longer listed on EOIR’s adjudication statistics page, which is why the Coalition keeps its own copy.

States considered and not included

Five states were considered and are not counted. The Bahamas and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines are recorded as having negotiated, with the Bahamas recorded as having initially refused. Uruguay is recorded as negotiating rather than concluded. Libya was identified as an intended destination and a transfer was attempted in connection with litigation, but there is not sufficient evidence of a concluded and operating arrangement. Nicaragua is reported to have received foreign nationals in a United States-organised operation without an arrangement comparable to those above, and is better described as an ad hoc acceptance. A sworn declaration filed in D.V.D. v. Department of Homeland Security now records that ICE flew an Iranian man holding withholding of removal to Nicaragua on 16 October 2025, and that a Nicaraguan officer told him the two governments had agreed he would be sent there so that Nicaragua could send him on to Iran; see Nicaragua under Destination countries. The standard applied to inclusion is an arrangement acknowledged by one of the governments, a disclosed diplomatic instrument, an asylum cooperation agreement, or operational cooperation demonstrating the receiving government’s consent.

This page describes the public record. It is not legal advice, and it is not a substitute for a lawyer. The Coalition does not represent individuals. Organisations that do are listed under Where to Find Help.