The program of expulsions to third countries implemented by the United States exposes expelled nationals to an “increased risk of human rights violations”, including torture and persecution, UN experts warned on Monday September 28.
This system triggers “a cascade of human rights violations, increases the risks of torture and ill-treatment, as well as enforced disappearance,” estimated around twenty United Nations experts in a press release.
According to the international investigation “The Deportation Project”, conducted by 72 journalists from 23 media outlets – including France 24 – from 15 countries and published last week by the Forbidden Stories consortium, the American government has deported more than 25,000 people to third countries, under the terms of secret agreements made with 35 countries so that they welcome people who have no connection with them.
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A “traumatic and isolating experience”
According to UN experts, “this system targets asylum seekers and migrants at different stages of their migration procedure”, within the framework of arrangements which “largely escape democratic control and independent human rights monitoring”.
These experts claim that these agreements have “opened the way to a series of other violations, including arbitrary and incommunicado detention, forced disappearances, (…) denial of due process guarantees, separation of families, discrimination, (…) slavery, human trafficking”.
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“These migrants are transferred to countries or territories with which they have no connection, which can constitute a traumatic and isolating experience,” added these experts mandated by the UN Human Rights Council, but who do not speak on behalf of the organization.
Some may also be sent “to places where they risk experiencing more violence or discrimination because of their gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or commitment to human rights,” they emphasize.
Countries “themselves plunged into conflicts”
The experts said they had alerted the United States as well as all the governments with which they have concluded outsourcing agreements, such as the Central African Republic, Honduras, Liberia, Libya and South Sudan.
“In many cases, these third countries are themselves immersed in conflicts. (…) They do not have the capacity to protect the rights of migrants sent to them by rich countries seeking to evade their international obligations,” they added.
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Regarding UN agencies such as the International Organization for Migration (IOM), which intervene to support these expelled people, the experts believe that “their participation must never legitimize systems exposing people to refoulement or other serious violations of human rights”.
They further warn that “participating in measures resulting in rights violations (…) may, in certain circumstances, constitute complicity.”
The experts therefore called on “all states and territories concerned (to) immediately end these arrangements”. “What is at stake is not only a migration policy, but the lives, security, dignity and rights” of people, they insisted.
With AFP
