Chris Nanos

On the mere grounds that they were on the location, the site where these deportees are being held.

I know that they have protective statuses in the United States and that most of them have been granted withholding of removal.

That means that they have met a higher burden of responsibility.

prove that they are more likely than not to be persecuted from the countries from where they come from, right?

And so under the 1951 UN Refugee Conventions and its protocols, they should be grandfathered everywhere they go as refugees because they must have shown a credible fear and even gone beyond in courts in the United States to show that they would be persecuted on one of the five grounds.

That's nationality, race, religion, membership in a particular social group, and political opinion.

And these people had met those burdens and were granted those statuses.

And just the mere fact that they are being sent to a third country and not to their country of origin presupposes that the United States recognizes not only its obligations by the convention, but that these people will be persecuted and that they were a great risk of being harmed if they were returned to their own countries.

We're talking variously about Ghana, we're talking about Senegal, we're talking about Angola, we're talking about Ethiopia, we're talking about Sierra Leone, Democratic Republic of Congo.

Not at all.

Not at all.

In fact, I have written to the International Office for Migration here in Cameroon asking those specific questions, asking to know, you know, the contractual basis under which the United States and Cameroon have this arrangement and how the IOM comes in as an intermediary.

These kind of contracts between nations is a sovereign right, right?

That's above my pay grade to gauge that.

But at least for public knowledge, for clarity, these are arrangements that are supposed to be in public so that people should know what is going on.

And even if they are treaty arrangements, then these treaties should be ratified by at least the parliament of Cameroon.

We're asking, one, that the international community, especially the United Nations, that's represented by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, and then the International Organization for Migration,

at least recognize that these people are refugees and be granted the rights that are intended to refugees as granted by the 1951 conventions and its protocols and other regional legal instruments that protect refugees.

And secondly, that because Cameroon has accepted these people as third country deportees, that Cameroon recognises its obligations by international law to respect and protect these people as refugees.

You have to like that challenge and discomfort and pain of climbing the mountains, but instead of walking back down, you get to ski.