A coalition of rights groups says Accra unlawfully received, detained, and re-deported people transferred from the United States under an agreement that has never been made public — a case that could test the legal limits of Africa’s migration cooperation with Washington.
Ghana has become the latest African country pulled into legal scrutiny over the Trump administration’s expanding practice of routing deportations through third countries, after a coalition of rights organisations filed a lawsuit before the ECOWAS Court of Justice on Monday.
The suit, brought on behalf of 27 individuals, accuses Ghana of unlawfully receiving, detaining, and deporting refugees and other protected migrants transferred from the United States under a secret bilateral arrangement. According to the filing, the 27 claimants are among at least 60 people moved from the US to Ghana since September 2025 under a deal whose terms have never been disclosed — despite what lawyers describe as repeated attempts to obtain them. A separate constitutional challenge seeking disclosure of the agreement is still pending before Ghana’s own domestic courts.
What makes the case especially serious, according to the claimants’ lawyers, is who was on those flights. Many of the people transferred to Ghana had already been granted protection from removal by US immigration judges, after successfully establishing that they faced persecution, torture, or other serious human rights abuses if sent back to their countries of origin. The lawsuit alleges that despite those protections, many were placed on onward flights or otherwise forced back to the very countries they had fled within days — in some cases hours — of landing in Ghana. Others, the suit says, were left stranded elsewhere in West Africa with no legal status, no money, and no support.
“Ghana cannot become a mechanism through which people are transferred from one jurisdiction to another without meaningful consideration of the dangers they face,” said Oliver Barker-Vormawor, senior partner at Merton & Everett LLP, one of the firms representing the claimants.
The claimants also describe rough treatment during the removal process itself — allegations of being shackled and restrained during deportation flights, and in some cases assaulted. Once in Ghana, they say they were held under armed guard in military facilities, airport holding cells, and hotels before being deported onward, with some reporting poor conditions, inadequate medical care, and threats from security personnel. One detainee is alleged to have attempted suicide while held at a military camp.
The case lands the ECOWAS Court squarely in the middle of a fast-growing pattern: the United States has been pressing a number of African governments to accept deportees who are not their own nationals, as part of a broader push to expand removal capacity beyond US borders. Legal advocates say a strong ruling against Ghana could set an important precedent limiting how far West African states can go in cooperating with such arrangements without violating their own human rights obligations under the ECOWAS treaty.
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