On April 29, together with more than 90 organizations, human rights defenders and experts from all over the world we signed an urgent appeal to the United Nations Security Council, its General Secretariat and other human rights bodies to denounce the agreement between the US and El Salvador to transfer and detain people at the Salvadoran Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT in Spanish). We request to UN and OAS mechanisms to investigate the details of the secret agreement and the conditions of detentions in CECOT; to urge the immediate cessation of the transfer of migrants and the return of the people that has been detained; and to promote and urgent debate, sanctions and a public condemnation from the international bodies.
The US government decided to expel over 200 migrants, most of the Venezuelans, to El Salvador where they were sent to the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT), the mega-jail for the detention of gang members in inhuman conditions. After a meeting between Nayib Bukele and the Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a bilateral agreement was reached through which the US government will pay over 6 million dollars to El Salvador to receive and confine the deportees. President Trump announced the agreement affirming that people sent to CECOT are “terrorists” who are part of the criminal organization “Tren de Aragua”. However, none of them has been through a judicial process that would allow those accusations, nor did they had any due process guarantees. Among the people transferred to CECOT is Kilmar Ábrego García, a Salvadoran man whom the US government said that was deported “by mistake”. His situation went to the Supreme Court which stated that the government must take measures to “facilitate” his release. Nevertheless, he still has not been able to return to the US where his family lives.
On May 13, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, stated his concern about the situation of deportations from the United States and decided to urge the U.S. government “to take the necessary steps to ensure due process, to give prompt and full effect to the decisions of its courts, to safeguard the rights of children and to end the removal of any person to any country where there is a real risk of torture or other irreparable harm.”
This kind of deportation and imprisonment of migrants in El Salvador implies a violation to fundamental rights. Ir also sets a severe precedent that might enable this practice to replicate in other countries of the region and to be a profound setback in the protection of migrant people. Urgent actions are imperative to put limits on this action.
Ph: Reuters