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On 7 October 2026, Ben Keith spoke at the International Bar Association’s Annual Conference in Copenhagen on the international law implications of third-country removals and legal strategies for challenging them. The session is the Immigration and Nationality Law Committee’s annual panel, held this year with the Human Rights Law Committee. Ben drew on IHR Advisors’ international law and INTERPOL casework. He spoke about the UK’s position after Rwanda and Brexit, about which international remedies actually arrive in time, and about what is left when the law runs out.
A third-country removal is the deportation of a person to a country other than their own, often one with which they have no connection. Sandra Grossman, who practises immigration and extradition law in the United States, opened with the US picture. By her team’s count, around 22,000 people had been sent to roughly 26 countries by August 2026. The removals run under agreements with about 50 states, which receive money, eased visa restrictions or law enforcement cooperation in return. Many of those removed had been refused asylum on discretionary grounds while winning protection under the Convention against Torture. In one case her firm handled, twelve Nigerian and Gambian nationals were detained overnight in September 2025. They were flown to Ghana in full-body restraints and sent on to the countries they had fled. The UN Committee against Torture granted interim measures within days, but too late.
Ambassador Heller explained that non-refoulement under Article 3 of the Convention is absolute, and that under the Committee’s General Comment No. 4 it extends to onward removal by the receiving state. The Committee has raised externalisation with several states: with Italy in 2026 over the Italy–Albania protocol, with Albania in 2025, with Denmark in 2023, and with Australia over offshore processing. It has also raised it with the United States over Venezuelans transferred to the CECOT prison in El Salvador. Bilateral deals do not dilute the sending state’s responsibility. Diplomatic assurances must meet four conditions: a full human rights assessment before any agreement, independent monitoring on the ground, legally binding terms with human rights clauses, and publication so that courts, parliaments and the press can scrutinise them.
Helle Holm Thomsen reminded the room that none of this is new. Denmark adopted a safe third country clause in 1986, before the Dublin system existed. The Dublin rules have since been replaced by the EU’s Asylum and Migration Management Regulation. The Rwanda idea was Danish before it was British, and Denmark’s legislation for processing claims abroad still sits on the books, dormant until a partner country signs. Political support for it, she said, now runs from the far right to the Social Democrats. Denmark has also been among the states pressing the European Court of Human Rights to revisit its case law on Articles 3 and 8.
Ben began with a point that surprised some of the room. International law does not, in itself, prohibit third-country removals. In principle they are the logical end point of a shared system. If every state party applied the same refugee and torture conventions to the same standard, it would make little difference which of them decided a claim. The problem, he said, is that practice never matches the theory. That gap is why the panel spent so much time on diplomatic assurances and conditions on the ground.
The UK’s Rwanda scheme showed what happens when that gap is ignored. Ben described a policy rushed onto the statute book with poor analysis of conditions in Rwanda, including the killing of refugees there only a few years earlier. It was defeated in the courts and abandoned after the change of government. No one was ever removed under it.
Ben argued that Brexit has left the UK in a worse position than the imperfect Dublin system it left behind. Outside Dublin, and without third-country agreements, the UK has almost no lawful route to return anyone who reaches it.
He gave an example from his own practice. An Iranian client held refugee status in Cyprus, left after struggling to find work and housing, and later claimed asylum in the UK. The Home Office argued that he was an economic migrant, not a refugee. That argument missed the point. With no returns agreement with Cyprus, the question was never whether he could go back to Cyprus. It was whether he could be sent to Iran. And the UK, Ben noted, has returned very few people to Iran, Iraq or Syria in years.
The consequence is an irony that rarely features in the political debate over small boats. For someone already refused in Europe, the UK has become a strong pull factor, because it is so hard to remove anyone from it.
Ben set out how he chooses between forums. For clients within the Council of Europe, the first resort is an interim measure under Rule 39 of the European Court of Human Rights’ Rules of Court. It remains one of the most effective instruments in international law and can be granted within 48 hours. But the threshold is now an imminent risk of irreparable harm, which in practice means strong evidence of torture or death. Without that, the client is removed and the case is heard three to five years later, after the damage is done. Most Council of Europe states comply with Rule 39 measures, though not all. Serbia has faced serious criticism for extraditing a dissident to Bahrain despite one.
Outside Europe, Ben turns to the UN Committee against Torture. He emphasised that the Committee has a judicial function as well as a reporting one, and that its interim measures can work. Idris Hasan, a Uyghur activist detained in Morocco on a Chinese request, was protected by the Committee’s interim measures. Morocco complied. He spent three and a half years in custody, but he was never sent to China, and he is now free. The route depends on the detaining state having accepted the individual complaints procedure. The UK has not, and neither has the United States.
He was frank about the limits. Ben files four or five UN applications a year and generally gets a decision within a year. Most applicants are less fortunate. At a recent seminar, Special Rapporteurs told him that with one junior staff member between them, a case must be exceptional before they can act on it. For many people, he said, whether the UN hears a case in time is a lottery.
Ambassador Heller set out the Committee’s side of the process. A complaint cannot be pending before another international or regional body at the same time, and domestic remedies must first be exhausted. Most individual communications concern Article 3. Where a state ignores a decision, the Committee invites its permanent representative in Geneva to explain why. Where a state has not accepted individual complaints, he pointed to the Special Rapporteur on torture and the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention. Sandra Grossman described the gap this leaves. Because the United States has not accepted the procedure, her petition in the Ghana case had to be brought against Ghana, which never responded.
Asked how lawyers should use the media, Ben said that by the time a case reaches the UN, it is usually in the last chance saloon. At that point publicity can make the difference. He described a Bahraini dissident held in Oman on a Red Notice. Her husband had already been rendered to Bahrain and had disappeared. She was put under guard in her hospital bed after giving birth. Media coverage, an intervention from the UN Special Rapporteur on counter-terrorism, Ben Saul, and calls from European embassies combined with legal work to secure her release.
Diplomatic pressure, he explained, rarely comes from the obvious embassy. In his experience the Dutch and the Danes have been more willing to help than the British. Networks of NGOs can usually find the right person to call. It works only where the detaining state cares about its reputation. Oman, which wants to be a tourism hub, did. Dubai, Ben observed, would not.
Helle Holm Thomsen gave the view from the other side of the bench. As a member of the Danish Refugee Appeals Board, she sees asylum seekers who protest outside embassies and post the pictures online to create a claim. The Board then asks how many followers they have and whether the authorities in their home country would ever notice. In her experience such activity often damages a claim. Ben agreed that UK tribunals face the same question with Iranian and Vietnamese claimants, but warned that motive does not remove danger. A post made for the wrong reasons can still put someone at real risk. Sandra Grossman added that US lawyers once relied on the press to support discretionary decisions. Now they must also weigh the safety of the client’s family, and of the lawyer and the firm.
We act for people facing removal, extradition and INTERPOL notices across borders. We bring urgent applications for interim measures to the European Court of Human Rights and to UN treaty bodies and Special Procedures, and work alongside local counsel where domestic courts are closed. Where a Red Notice lies behind the threat of removal, our INTERPOL practice challenges it before the Commission for the Control of INTERPOL’s Files.
Our thanks to Sandra Grossman for chairing, to Ambassador Heller and Helle Holm Thomsen, and to the IBA’s Immigration and Nationality Law and Human Rights Law Committees. The session details are on the IBA website.
If you or a client face removal to a third country, contact us in confidence.
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