Human-rights lawyers filed a case against Equatorial Guinea on June 5, 2026, alleging that it unlawfully transferred people deported by the United States onward to their countries of origin, where they faced persecution. The applicants asked the African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights for urgent intervention.
The case was brought by several organizations, including the Global Strategic Litigation Council, on behalf of 14 African migrants sent from the United States to Equatorial Guinea between November 2025 and April 2026. The filing sought an immediate halt to further deportations, removals or transfers, improved detention conditions and compensation for people already returned.
The commission is the African Union's main human-rights body. It can issue decisions and emergency measures or refer matters to the African Court on Human and Peoples' Rights, but its orders are not binding. Advocates nevertheless said a favorable ruling could pressure African governments participating in US third-country deportation arrangements.
Lawyers called the reported transfers “chain refoulement,” meaning an indirect return through an intermediary country to a place where a person risks persecution. They said Equatorial Guinea sent six deportees to an eastern African country in the preceding week. The migrants allegedly faced political, religious, ethnic or sexual-orientation-based persecution, and some had previously experienced detention, torture or sexual violence.
US immigration judges had protected all 14 from direct return to their home countries under federal law, according to the applicants. After the latest transfers, two people fled again and went into hiding. Three others were refused admission for lacking valid travel documents and were returned to Equatorial Guinea, leaving them in legal uncertainty. These details were claims in the rights groups' case, not findings by the commission.
Advocates say the Trump administration has used confidential agreements to send thousands of migrants to nearly two dozen countries other than their own. Equatorial Guinea is among at least eight African states reported to have such an arrangement. Under what AP described as a $7.5 million agreement with Washington, it received at least 32 deportees.
The filing followed related litigation in Eswatini. In March, the commission allowed a challenge over prolonged detention of third-country deportees there to proceed. Eswatini's Supreme Court later ruled that four men held in a maximum-security prison could meet a lawyer after nine months without in-person legal counsel.
Equatorial Guinea, an oil-rich country led by President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, has faced accusations of corruption and grave rights abuses from advocacy groups and the US State Department. US companies are major investors, and Washington funds military training there.
The new case tests whether regional institutions can constrain a cross-border deportation system even when their remedies are formally nonbinding. Equatorial Guinea's response was not included in the available reporting.
