A judge in Eswatini has failed to appear for a court hearing about the continued detention of four men deported there by the United States.
The case, scheduled for Thursday, was brought by several non-profit organisations that have challenged the legality of holding the men from Cuba, Laos, Vietnam and Yemen without charges.
The four were sent to Eswatini in mid-July as part of President Donald Trump’s push for the mass deportation of migrants and asylum seekers from the US.
Trump has controversially used so-called third countries to accept non-citizen deportees whose home countries are elsewhere.
Such “third countries” have included at least four African nations: Eswatini, South Sudan, Ghana and Rwanda. More than 30 people have been deported from the US to Africa since July.
But human rights advocates have questioned the constitutionality of such deportations, which leave deportees far from home, in countries where they may not even speak the language.
Some have expressed fears that the deportees will be denied their rights to due process in repressive or unstable countries abroad.
In the case of Eswatini, a small, landlocked country in Southern African, US-based lawyers claim that the four deported men who remain in custody have been denied access to legal counsel.
They have been held at the country’s top maximum-security prison, the Matsapha Correctional Complex, for more than two months.
No reason was given for Judge Titus Mlangeni’s absence from the court hearing on Thursday.
Zakhithi Sibandze — the national coordinator for the Swaziland Rural Women’s Assembly, one of the nonprofit organisations involved in Thursday’s legal challenge — accused the Eswatini authorities of using delaying tactics to avoid criticism over the case.
A second case brought by a lawyer seeking to provide legal counsel for the deportees has also been repeatedly delayed.
Eswatini is considered one of the world’s last absolute monarchies, and the king there rules by decree.
Earlier this week, on Tuesday, the nonprofit Human Rights Watch issued a statement denouncing the deportations to Eswatini and other countries, highlighting the financial transactions involved.
Human Rights Watch reported that the US has agreed to provide $5.1m to build Eswatini’s “border and migration management capacity” in exchange for the country accepting up to 160 deportees.
The nonprofit denounced the “harsh conditions” the four deported men face.
“These agreements make African governments partners in the Trump administration’s horrifying violations of immigrants’ human rights,” Allan Ngari, the group’s Africa advocacy director, said in a statement.
On September 19, Amnesty International, another human rights organisation, likewise slammed the conditions the deportees faced in Eswatini.
“Despite repeated attempts by counsel to secure confidential, in-person, unmonitored legal access to their clients, officials obstructed visits and on a later occasion proposed monitored/video-only contact, which does not meet international standards,” Amnesty wrote in a statement.
It called on officials in Eswatini to provide the men access to confidential legal counsel and “provide legal grounds for their detention”.
Originally, a total of five men were sent in the US’s initial deportation flight to Eswatini. But on Monday, the Eswatini government announced that one of the men had been repatriated to Jamaica a day prior.
The man was identified in the government statement as Orville Isaac Etoria.
“Mr Etoria has safely returned to Jamaica, where he was warmly welcomed by members of his family,” the Eswatini government said in its statement.
It added that the remaining four men are still being held in detention while efforts to repatriate them are ongoing.
Etoria, who arrived in the US as a child, had already completed a 25-year sentence for crimes in the US when he was deported to Eswatini and re-imprisoned there, according to the New York-based Legal Aid Society.
The US Department of Homeland Security said in July that the five individuals sent to Eswatini had been convicted of crimes “so uniquely barbaric that their own countries won’t take them back.”
Etoria had been convicted of murder, it said.
But Eswatini’s government said shortly after that some of the countries had reached out to say it was not true that they had rejected their citizens.
Despite Etoria’s recent return to Jamaica, groups like Amnesty International have continued to petition Eswatini to explain why he was held in prison without new charges for months.
“The safe arrival of Mr Etoria to Jamaica, cannot be an excuse for silence about what happened to him while he was held without charge and without full and confidential access to lawyers,” Tigere Chagutah, the group’s regional director for east and southern Africa, said in a statement on Thursday.
