A photo shows a prison checkpoint where deportees from the United States with criminal records in Matsapha, central Eswatini, on September 10, 2025.
JOHANNESBURG - Eswatini's top court has ruled that migrants deported from the United States to the African kingdom last July are entitled to visits from a local lawyer, a judgment seen by AFP on Friday showed.
The tiny country has taken in 19 men as part of the US's deal with several African nations to accept migrants under a third-country deportation programme widely criticised by rights groups.
The government lost its appeal against an earlier ruling allowing Eswatini human rights lawyer Sibusiso Nhlabatsi to visit the first group of five deported men. One of them, a Jamaican national, has since been returned to the Caribbean island.
"The issue of access per se is not challenged on appeal but the court finds itself compelled to comment that ultimately, there can be no real harm in granting the respondent access to the detainees," the three-judge panel said in a ruling issued Thursday.
"It then will be up to the detainees, if they do not wish to see the respondent, to tell this to the respondent to his face," they said, referring to Nhlabatsi.
Eswatini, Africa's last absolute monarchy, confirmed in November that it had received around $5.1 million (R83.5 million) from the United States to accept the deportees.
READ: Ten more US deportees sent to Eswatini
According to a document revealed by Human Rights Watch in September and seen by AFP, Eswatini agreed to take 160 deportees in exchange for funds to strengthen its border and migration management capacity.
A Cambodian man was repatriated last month, leaving 17 men at the high-security Matsapha Correctional Centre outside the capital, Mbabane.
US-based migration lawyer Alma David, who represents some of the other detainees, said "the fact that it took nearly nine months of litigation" and a decision by the top court to achieve these visits "speaks volumes about how hard the government of Eswatini is fighting to deny these men the most basic of rights".
Eswatini, formerly known as Swaziland and landlocked between South Africa and Mozambique, has been led by King Mswati III since 1986, and his government has been accused of human rights violations.
US President Donald Trump has overseen a drastic expansion of the practice of deporting migrants to countries other than their own.
Equatorial Guinea, Ghana, Rwanda, Uganda and South Sudan have also accepted US deportees.