Jordanian police have detained and said they will deport about 800 Sudanese asylum seekers, Human Rights Watch said in an announcement yesterday. The incident happened yesterday.

The vast majority of Sudanese in Jordan come from the Darfur region.

“Deporting refugees violates the customary international law principle of nonrefoulement, which forbids governments from returning people to places where they risk being persecuted, tortured, or exposed to inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment,” says HRW.

Jordan’s government spokesperson told the Associated Press that the group numbered 800, and that “asylum conditions don't apply to [Sudanese]” because they entered Jordan under the pretext of seeking medical treatment.

“There is no excuse for Jordan to deport vulnerable asylum seekers back to Sudan, regardless of how they entered the country,” said Joe Stork, deputy Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. “Jordan should not punish these Sudanese merely because they protested for better conditions and for resettlement consideration.”

Police on 16 December rounded up the Sudanese, including men, women, and children, at a camp erected on November 15 in front of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) office in Amman. The Sudanese were protesting what they viewed as discrimination in provision of humanitarian assistance and resettlement services.

An “official source” was quoted in media reports as saying that Jordanian police detained around 750 Sudanese men and women from the protest camp in front of the UNHCR office and transported them to Queen Alia International Airport to process them for deportation.

Several Sudanese men in the group told Human Rights Watch that all Sudanese in the group are registered with UNHCR as asylum seekers or refugees. An international journalist who went to the airport said she saw 30 to 40 children among the Sudanese set for deportation.

Three Sudanese asylum seekers told Human Rights Watch by phone that dozens of Jordanian police arrived with around 14 buses at about 4 a.m. on December 16, and ushered all the Sudanese from their protest camp tents into the buses. The buses transported the Sudanese to an area near Queen Ali International Airport, 30 kilometers south of Amman.

The men said that after the buses arrived near the airport, the authorities held the Sudanese in the buses for at least three hours. Around 10:30 a.m., they said, authorities drove them further into the airport grounds, took them off the buses, and tried to separate them into those who had passports and those who did not.