LAGOS: A civil society group has filed a lawsuit seeking to declare illegal the deportation deal between Ghana and the US government, and the way the west African deportees are being treated, court documents show.
Ghanaian leader John Mahama disclosed last month that his country had struck a deal with the United States to accept deportees from west Africa as part of US President Donald Trump’s vast, opaque deportation program.
At least 28 people have arrived in the west African nation so far, and Ghana has been sending some of them to their countries of origin or dumping them in third countries without documentation, lawyers and deportees have said.
On Monday a non-partisan civil society platform, Democracy Hub, lodged the suit in the Supreme Court against the Ghana government, according to court papers seen by AFP on Tuesday.
It argued that Mahama “acted unconstitutionally” by implementing the agreement with the US government with respect “to the reception, detention, and onward transfer of involuntarily repatriated West African nationals” into Ghana without a parliamentary resolution or ratification of the deal.
