Congo agrees to accept repatriated individuals in pact with United States

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The Democratic Republic of Congo has said it will take in foreigners deported from the United States under a deal with Washington, which also wants access to Congolese mineral wealth.

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Contacted by AFP on Tuesday, the government did not say how many third-country nationals would be accepted under the agreement nor what the US had offered the Kinshasa government in return for participating in its mass deportation campaign.

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Several other African countries have, in recent months, made deals with the United States to take in deportees — Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea, Eswatini, Ghana, Rwanda and South Sudan.

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A number of the deals include US financial or logistical assistance.

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Many of the people rounded up for deportation have US work permits and no criminal record, according to US statistics.

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Human Rights Watch said in September the “opaque deals” were “part of a US policy approach that violated international human rights law and is designed to instrumentalise human suffering as a deterrent to migration”.

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The NGO said recent expulsions of people to African countries had “exposed several hundred people to a risk of arbitrary detention, ill-treatment and refoulement”.

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Refoulement refers to the practice of forcibly sending refugees or asylum seekers to a country where they are liable to suffer persecution.

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On Sunday, the DRC government announced it would “temporarily take in third country nationals” from the United States, starting this month.

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The huge central African country is one of the poorest in the world and nearly three quarters of the population live under the poverty threshold, according to World Bank figures.

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The DRC communications ministry said the deportees would be taken to Kinshasa, whose infrastructure is insufficient for the needs of the 17 million people living in the capital.

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Most homes lack access to running water or electricity.

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The government said it had made arrangements for “reception facilities”.

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The ministry said there would be no cost to the Congolese government because “the logistical and technical aspects of the operation will be handled by the US government”.

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United Nations human rights experts complained in July that the Trump administration’s “expedited removal procedure could allow people to be taken to a country other than their own in as little as a single day, without an immigration court hearing or other appearance before a judge”.

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Kinshasa and Washington are also negotiating US access to DRC health data and mineral assets.

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The two governments signed a $1.2-billion health partnership in February allowing the United States to gather data on epidemics.

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In December, the DRC signed an agreement granting Washington access to its vast mineral reserves.

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The plan gives Washington access to copper, cobalt, coltan and lithium, at a time of intensifying global competition among major powers for such critical resources.

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In return, the US has mediated negotiations between the DRC and neighbouring Rwanda designed to stabilise the conflict-plagued eastern DRC, where much of the mineral wealth is concentrated.

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The negotiations have not, as yet, led to a halt in the fighting that has beset the eastern DRC for the past three decades.

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