Rights groups sue Equatorial Guinea over US deportations to persecution zones

On a Friday in early June, human rights lawyers filed a case before Africa's highest human rights tribunal, accusing Equatorial Guinea of systematically sending deportees back to countries where they face torture, persecution, and death. The filing, brought by the Global Strategic Litigation Council and allied organizations, names fourteen African migrants who were deported from the United States to Equatorial Guinea between November 2025 and April 2026, then transferred onward to their home countries in what lawyers describe as a deliberate chain of removal designed to circumvent U.S. asylum protections.

The case asks the African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights—the African Union's primary human rights body—to order Equatorial Guinea to stop all further deportations and transfers immediately, to improve detention conditions, and to compensate those already returned. What makes this filing historic, according to Beatrice Njeri, the Global Strategic Litigation Council's regional litigator for Africa, is that it represents the first case in the region involving people who had already been granted legal protection from removal by U.S. courts, yet were still sent to places where they face persecution. The commission can issue urgent measures and refer cases to the Africa Court on Human and Peoples' Rights, though its orders carry no binding force. Still, advocates see the case as a potential lever to pressure other African governments now housing U.S. deportees.

The mechanics of what happened reveal a deliberate architecture of displacement. Under a series of often-secret agreements, the Trump administration has deported thousands of people to nearly two dozen countries that are not their own—a legal maneuver that immigration lawyers say functions as an end-run around asylum law. By sending people to third countries first, the administration can indirectly force asylum seekers back to their home countries without directly violating U.S. court orders protecting them. Equatorial Guinea is one of at least eight African nations that have signed such deals with Washington. The arrangement with Equatorial Guinea came with a price tag of $7.5 million.

Last week, Equatorial Guinea authorities transferred six of the fourteen deportees to their country of origin in eastern Africa. All fourteen migrants had been previously arrested, detained, or tortured in their home countries. They faced political, religious, and ethnic persecution. Some had experienced sexual violence. All had been protected by U.S. immigration judges from being returned. Upon arrival, two of them immediately fled and went into hiding. Three others were rejected by their country of origin because they lacked valid travel documents and had not been notified they were coming. Those three were sent back to Equatorial Guinea, where they now exist in legal limbo—neither in their home country nor in any country that will claim them. "They have effectively been rendered stateless," said Bella Mosselmans, director of the Global Strategic Litigation Council, calling the process "a cycle of hell."

Equatorial Guinea itself is a country where critical voices disappear. It is one of the richest nations in Africa, buoyed by oil wealth, yet it is also rife with corruption and human rights abuses. The government, led by all-powerful president Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, has been accused by rights groups and the U.S. State Department of detaining, torturing, and killing those who speak out. There are virtually no independent media outlets, no functioning opposition. Yet the United States maintains close ties. U.S. businesses are the country's largest foreign investors. The U.S. military provides training funding. Senator Jeanne Shaheen, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has called Equatorial Guinea "one of the most corrupt governments in the world." The Associated Press gained exclusive access to a hotel that Equatorial Guinea converted into a prison for asylum seekers deported from America.

This case arrives as a second front in a broader legal battle over third-country deportations. In March, the African Commission allowed a similar suit to proceed challenging the unlawful detention of third-country deportees in Eswatini. A month later, Eswatini's Supreme Court ruled that four men held there could finally meet with a lawyer—after nine months of being denied in-person legal counsel while imprisoned in a maximum-security facility. The precedent suggests that African courts are beginning to intervene. What happens in the coming months will signal whether regional human rights bodies can exercise real pressure on governments complicit in what lawyers call chain refoulement—the indirect return of people to persecution.