A group of West African nationals deported from the United States to Ghana earlier this month have filed a lawsuit against the Ghanaian government for unlawful detention. Lawyers representing the deportees report they are still being held in a military camp near Accra, even though there are no formal charges against them and the authorities say they are being returned to their home countries.
Fourteen people from various countries in West Africa landed in Ghana on 6 September, after the government in Accra agreed to take in third-country nationals expelled from the US.
Ghanaian authorities say all the deportees have since been sent back to their countries of origin. But lawyers for 11 of the deportees claim they are still being detained in a military camp.
The lawsuit alleges that Ghana is in breach of its constitution and international treaties in holding the deportees without charge and demands their release – as well as their right not to be sent to their home countries where their life is at risk.
Conflicting accounts
At the request of the deportees' families and their lawyers in the US, a Ghanaian law firm, Merton & Everett, filed a lawsuit on Wednesday for unlawful detention against Ghana's attorney general, the chief of staff of the armed forces and comptroller general of the immigration service.
Speaking to RFI, the lawyers said that they are satisfied, having cross-checked information provided by the deportees, that their clients are indeed in Ghana. They believe they are detained at Bundase military camp, 70km from Accra, under military surveillance restricting access to them.
Information about the deportees has been difficult to come by, according to Oliver Barker-Vormawor, a lawyer at Merton & Everett.
"We reached out to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs who insisted that all of them have been repatriated. We contacted the Ghana Armed Forces, which said they have no idea about the issue and said they were not holding the people," he told RFI’s Victor Cariou in Accra.
Testimonies
The West African nationals, 10 men and four women from Nigeria, Liberia, Togo, Gambia and Mali, landed in Ghana on 6 September. They said they were taken from their cells in Louisiana, in the middle of the night on 5 September, shackled in chains and put on a military cargo plane without being informed where they were being taken.
Four of them were placed in straitjackets because they refused to get on the plane without speaking to their lawyers.
According to court documents seen by RFI, three of the deportees were removed to their countries of origin between 6 and 10 September.
In a statement filed to the Accra court, a deportee from Gambia said he was placed on a flight back home on 10 September, accompanied by two Ghanaian immigration officials. He was then released, but is living in hiding because of his bisexuality, punishable by law in Gambia.
“I’d won protection from being returned to Gambia under the Convention against Torture. I told them [Ghanaian immigration officials] that I wanted to stay in Ghana for my safety,” he testified.
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Another deportee from Nigeria also said he feared for his life if he was forced to return. He won protection in the US from being returned to his home country and is married to a US citizen. The deportee was a politician in Nigeria and said he had been beaten up by political rivals and tortured by the police before he fled his country.
“If I go back to Nigeria, I will be tortured and possibly killed,” he said.
He claims that neither US immigration officers nor Ghanaian and Nigerian officials heeded his efforts to explain the potential danger.
“They told us they did not care and that we will be sent back to Nigeria anyway,” he said.
Out of US hands
Lawyers in the US also filed a lawsuit, on behalf of five of the deportees, to immediately halt deportations to their countries of origin.
US federal judge in Washington, Tanya S. Chutkan, ruled that now the deportees are in Ghanaian custody, her “hands are tied”.
The judge said she is alarmed and dismayed by the circumstances under which these removals are being carried out.
“It [the court] is aware of the dire consequences Plaintiffs [the deportees] face if they are repatriated… to countries where they face torture and persecution,” she wrote on Monday.
Speaking to journalist Bernard Avle on Channel One TV in Ghana on Wednesday 17 September, Foreign affairs minister, Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa said that Ghana is not doing the US a favour, but doing fellow Africans a favour.
“The choice is theirs really. For 90 days, if they want to stay, they can stay but so far all of them have indicated that they want to go back and we’ve been facilitating that,” he added.
More deportees to come
According to the minister, another 40 West African deportees are expected in Ghana in the next few days.
Ghana is one of the five African states, along with, Rwanda, Uganda, Eswatini and South Sudan, to accept people deported from the US as part of the Trump’s administration crackdown on illegal migration.
Ghana’s opposition has demanded the immediate suspension of the pact. It also demands to see the memorandum of understanding between the US and Ghana which has not been ratified by parliament.
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Minister Ablakwa, insisted that his government’s decision to accept West African deportees from the US “is grounded purely on humanitarian principles and pan-African solidarity”.
“It is important to stress that Ghana has not received and does not seek any financial compensation or material benefit in relation to this understanding [with the United States],” he told journalists on Monday.
Arguing that the deal was designed to “offer temporary refuge when needed”, he rebutted critics’ claims that Accra was aligning itself with the anti-immigration administration in Washington.
“This should not be misconstrued as an endorsement of the immigration policies of the Trump administration,” he said.
