LONDON (AL-Jazeera) - More than 80 Cameroonian asylum seekers deported by the United States between 2019 and 2021 suffered serious human rights violations – from torture and rape to enforced disappearance – on their return home, according to a report by Human Rights Watch.
In a 149-page report released, the New York-based rights group also documented dozens of cases of alleged abuse and mistreatment by officers of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) against those deported.
“The U.S. government utterly failed Cameroonians with credible asylum claims by sending them back to harm in the country they fled, as well as mistreating already traumatized people before and during deportation,” said Lauren Seibert, refugee and migrant rights researcher at Human Rights Watch.
“The Cameroon and U.S. governments need to remedy these abuses, and U.S. authorities should provide opportunities for wrongly deported Cameroonians to return and reapply for asylum,” Seibert added.
HRW said it had interviewed 41 deported Cameroonian asylum seekers and 54 other people in the U.S. and Cameroon for the report, and collected and analysed U.S. asylum and immigration documents – including photos, videos and recordings – of deported people.
The rights group said the U.S. was in violation of the principle of nonrefoulement, a cornerstone of international refugee and human rights law, that states that no one should be returned to a country where they would face torture, cruel and inhuman treatment.
Some areas of Cameroon have been gripped by violence after Anglophone separatists launched a campaign in the northwest and southwest regions to break away from the country’s French-speaking majority in 2016. Since then, researchers say that 3,500 people have been killed amid clashes between separatists and state forces, while about 700,000 were forced to flee from their homes.
HRW said that nearly all of the people interviewed for the report had left Cameroon due to reasons linked to the violence in the Anglophone regions.
HRW said that Cameroonian authorities had also abused returnees for having fled and for seeking asylum in the U.S.
The human rights group also outlined how ICE, at the time under the Trump administration, mistreated nearly all the asylum seekers interviewed for the report.