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.
The country has taken in 19 men as part of US deals 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 confirmed in November that it had received around $5.1 million from the United States to accept the deportees.
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 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.
