Every so often, Africa surprises its critics. Just when one begins to despair that the continent’s human rights institutions are little more than expensive talk shops, along comes a legal challenge to Donald Trump’s third-country deportation arrangement with Equatorial Guinea at the African Commission on Human and People’s Rights (ACHPR).

The protagonists are not politicians or diplomats but lawyers with little more than legal briefs and a strong belief that human rights still matter.

Under the third-country deportation scheme, the US has been deporting unwanted immigrants to multiple countries the deportees have absolutely no ties with since mid-2025. The tally stands at more than 300, with 19 currently held in prisons over the border in Eswatini, making the tiny kingdom of only about 1.2-million people one of the scheme’s most active African participants. For its troubles, the Eswatini government reportedly pocketed $5-million.

Other African third countries are Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea, Rwanda, South Sudan and Uganda.

The scheme has been criticised as a kind of geopolitical pass-the-parcel. Unable or unwilling to return unwanted foreign nationals to their countries of origin, the US has in fact been dispatching them to countries they have never lived in and whose languages they often don’t speak. Worse, they could be returned home and face persecution.

Now lawyers from Asian Americans Advancing Justice, the Global Strategic Litigation Council and Equatorial Guinea Justice, all based in the US, along with the Gambia’s Institute for Human Rights and Development in Africa and the Tanzania-based Pan African Lawyers Union, filed a lawsuit a fortnight ago petitioning the ACHPR to use its emergency powers to suspend further deportations to Equatorial Guinea, which has already accepted at least 32 individuals since last year.

Of course, the Gambia-based commission – which is tasked with assessing compliance with the African Charter – has no police force, no marshals and no practical means of physically enforcing its decisions. Its authority rests purely on the legal obligations that African States assume when they ratify the African Charter on Human and People’s Rights, diplomatic and political pressure from the African Union and the possibility of referral to the African Court on Human and People’s Rights in certain circumstances.

So, it’s not a given that no more hapless souls will be headed the way of Equatorial Guinea, a country with a particularly poor human rights record. We in Mzansi got a glimpse into this grim reality from South African mercenary Nick du Toit, who spent five years in the West African country’s infamous Black Beach prison alongside Briton Simon Mann and others for a failed coup attempt against President Obiang Nguema, who has been at the helm since 1979. On his unexpected release in November 2009, Du Toit told South African reporters of having a gun placed to his head and being threatened with death by one of Nguema’s advisers and of torture with electric shock devices and burning cigarettes.

If Du Toit’s account is to be believed, one coup plotter died of a heart attack while being tortured.

More recently, South African engineers Frik Potgieter and Peter Huxham, employees of SBM Offshore, a Dutch-headquartered company that designs, builds, owns and operates floating production systems for the offshore oil and gas industry, were arrested by Equatorial Guinean authorities in February 2023 on drug trafficking charges and sentenced to 12 years’ imprisonment.

Their families, employer and the South African government consistently maintained that the charges were politically motivated and linked to a separate legal dispute involving assets belonging to Vice-President Terodoro Nguema Obiang Mangwe that had been attached in South Africa.

The two were eventually released in June 2025, after spending more than two years in prison. The UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention had earlier concluded that their detention was arbitrary and unlawful.

The fact that a UN body found the detention arbitrary, combined with allegations that Potgieter and Huxham had been pawns in a diplomatic and commercial dispute, hardly strengthens Equatorial Guinea’s credentials as a safe destination for migrants unwanted by the Trump administration.

Whatever the outcome of the lawsuit, the lawyers who have approached the ACHPR deserve applause for fighting with little more than legal arguments and their belief that human rights apply even to people nobody wants.