Memorial Human
Rights Center
Maly Karetny pereulok, 12 Moscow
127051 Russia
tel. (495) 225-31-18
Civic Assistance Committee
Ul.
Dolgorukovskaya, 33, 6 Moscow 127006 Russia
tel. (495) 251 5319;
8-499- 973 54 43, 8-499-973 5474
Web-site: http://refugee.memo.ru/
Expelling refugees as a means of imitating the
anti-terror campaign
Over the past
several years, the Russian secret services have sharply stepped up cooperation
with their colleagues from the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO)
member-states on the forced handover to their countries of origin of citizens
who fled political repression. The
creation of a “single search list for law enforcement agencies and secret
services of the SCO member-states”
means that a serious risk of arrest on the territory of any of the SCO
member-states and subsequent deportation back home exists for anyone who fled
their countries from politically motivated prosecution. These people are being forcibly returned to
their countries of origin, where they face threats of torture and prison
sentences that are handed out in gross violations of international legal
standards.
In the first
order, this concerns refugees from Uzbekistan
and China – countries that,
together with Russia,
under the flag of the fight against “international terrorism” are leading their
SCO colleagues in a campaign against ideological diversity, trying to unify its
citizens’ permitted political and religious beliefs.
The actual
extraditions are being carried out in all types of ways, often without filling
out the proper – or even any – legal documentation required by existing
laws. Administrative expulsions and deportations, as well as kidnappings and
illegal forced removal from the territory of Russia of citizens being
sought by their native countries’ secret services, are often employed for these
purposes.
Examples of forced expulsions to their
homelands of Uzbek and Chinese citizens will be used to examine how the
above-mentioned mechanisms work – and how Russian authorities commit gross
violations of human rights in their employment.
Expulsion to Uzbekistan
Illegal
extraditions from Russia to Uzbekistan are
primarily carried out against citizens who are accused by the Uzbek side of
belonging to Muslim organizations and movements that are prosecuted in that
country. All of the cases examined below
involve people who are innocent of criminal activities, and especially those of
a terrorist nature and/or of their preparation, i.e. those whose prosecution is
recognized as being ideologically motivated.
In case of their forced return to their homeland, they face the threat
of torture and imprisonment through wrongful sentences.
Extradition checks
against Uzbek citizens are widely carried on the basis of falsified charges, in which the individuals are declared wanted in
their homeland already after their
detention in Russia. This is done in order to bring
incriminating charges against the detained in accordance with the regulations
of Russian legal law, since the Convention on Legal Assistance and Legal
Relations in Civil, Family and Criminal Matters (the so-called Minsk
Convention), which regulates the extradition process, assumes that the alleged
crime is considered criminal by the laws of both the appealing and the appealed
to side (item 2, chapter 56). It should
be noted that in such cases, the Russian Prosecutor General’s office clearly
ignores the obvious signs of the use of arbitrary formulation of the charges,
and adopts extradition decisions despite their clear presence in the documents
presented by the Uzbek side.
Thus, for
example, was the case with Bayramal Yusupov, charges against whom were changed
and appended three times while he was being held in detention in Russia. Their initial content completely disappeared,
while the incriminating charge of his participation in a nonexistent Muslim
organization was changed to his involvement in the Islamic Movement of
Uzbekistan, which is banned as a terrorist organization in many countries of
the world.
Similar
irregularities existed in the documents of the so-called “Ivanovo Uzbeks,”
whose case received broad attention. In
their case, the Russian Prosecutor General’s office allowed itself not only
“not to notice” the clear signs of fabricated charges presented by the Uzbek
side, but went one step further: the
extradition resolutions arbitrarily expand the list of criminal charges beyond
those that appeared in the extradition request.
The “Ivanovo Uzbeks’” handover to Uzbek law enforcement authorities
was prevented only with the help of the European Court of Human Rights, which
decided to adopt Rule 39 of the Court’s regulations, which obligated the
Russian authorities to abstain from extraditing the defendants until the case
was heard in Strasburg.
This case also
displayed another tendency in the attempts to extradite those whom the friendly
Russian and Uzbek regimes “appoint” as terrorists. One speaks of the meticulously developed mechanism of annulling the Russian Federation
citizenship previously adopted by people sought by Uzbek authorities, and which
prevents their handover. Thus, the
Russian citizenship of one of the “Ivanovo Uzbeks,” Khatam Khadzhimatov, was
deemed to have been illegally obtained, and the decision to award it annulled
based on falsified Uzbek documents.
Khadzhimatov
managed to leave Russia
and win asylum in a safe country. At the
same time, shortly before him, another Russian citizen of Uzbek origin, Alisher
Usmanov, was illegally stripped of his
Russian citizenship in the manner described above, kidnapped at the moment
of his release from remand prison No. 1 in the city of Kazan and illegally removed to Uzbekistan,
where he was sentenced to an eight-year prison term. According to a report by the RIA Novosti news
agency, which cited the Uzbek National Security Service, he was “convoyed from Kazan
to Uzbekistan
in accordance with a joint plan with the Russian FSB to fight international
terrorism.” Disregard for the law in
his case was particularly displayed by the head of the criminal police of the
Directorate of Internal Affairs of the Vakhitovsk region of the city of Kazan,
V. V. Kononenko, who was charged with the search for Usmanov, who was declared
missing. Mr. Kononenko told a
representative of a human rights organization that one should not be seeking to
arrange Usmanov’s return to Russian because “he is a terrorist, and the fact
that a court acquitted him of belonging to a terrorist organization means nothing
since law enforcement agencies have reliable information contradicting this.”
As follows from
a letter written by Usmanov, his kidnapping operation began in the Kazan
pretrial detention facility, and he was taken to Uzbekistan by plane, which
leaves no doubts that he would not have
been able to leave the prison grounds, or cross the state border of the Russian
Federation at the airport, had the Uzbek secret services not been directly
assisted in their actions by their Russian colleagues.
This illegal cooperation
was fully displayed in how in April 2007, in the Sverdlovsk region, Uzbek citizen Abdulaziz
Boymatov was also kidnapped and forcefully returned to his homeland. The Russian Prosecutor General’s office had
four months earlier officially denied his handover to Uzbek authorities. Boymatov had been ordered to appear before
the head of the area criminal police, V. G. Chempalov. Accompanied by a person whom Chempalov identified
as a member of the regional Directorate of the Federal Migration Service, who
was to assist him in formalizing documents for his legal residence in Russia, he was taken under false pretences to
the city of Yekaterinburg. Several days later, it turned out that
Boymatov was delivered to Tashkent
and was being held in a pretrial detention facility, from where he was shortly
to be convoyed to the Namagansk remand prison.
In July 2007, a petition was filed on Boymatov’s behalf before a United
Nations working group on enforced or involuntary disappearances, which made
urgent inquiries with Uzbek and Russian representatives. At the moment, we have no information about
whether it received any response or not.
Russian law enforcement authorities are in essence
involved in providing cover for the illegal activities of the Uzbek secret
services on the territory Russia. This is clearly
evident in the case of Uzbek citizen Mukhammadsolikh Abutov, detained on June
13 in the Moscow-area city of Krasnogorsk
by Uzbek National Security Service agents.
After he was delivered to the police, where it was learned that he did
not appear on any international wanted lists, the Russian police offered to provide “cover” for the Uzbek security
officials if they quickly presented a search warrant for the detained. This was delivered within the next several
days. The illegal cooperation
between Uzbek National Security Service representatives and the Russian
Interior Ministry was then practically “legalized” by a court decision on
Abutov’s detention for subsequent extradition to Uzbekistan.
And finally, a
vivid example of the imitation of antiterrorist activity and the patronage of
I. Karimov’s dictatorial regime is the October 2006 expulsion of Uzbek citizen
Rustam Muminov. After the Russian Prosecutor General’s office denied a request on his
extradition, he was administratively expelled from Russia, with the simultaneous
handover to Uzbek secret services, and in January 2005, was sentenced in
his homeland to a 5.5-year prison term based on fabricated charges of a
religious nature. Muminov’s “administrative
expulsion,” which was later recognized as illegal in court, was carried out in
contradiction of both Russian legislation and international law, including in
breach of a European Court
order to prevent his expulsion to his homeland.
The fact that his “expulsion” was in fact a concealed form of his
extradition is confirmed by the fact that in one of the documents, the delay of
Muminov’s departure from a 7:20 p.m. flight to one scheduled for 11:50 p.m. of
the same day was explained by the late arrival of an Uzbek convoy. The operation was carried out under the
strict control of the Russian FSB and with the direct involvement of agents
from this secret service. It was also accompanied
by a fierce slander campaign in the press about Muminov’s alleged terrorist
activities, with the media citing information received from the Russian FSB’s
public affairs office.
The systematic nature of the practice of actual
extraditions under the guise of “administrative expulsions” is confirmed by an attempt by Russian law enforcement agencies to
repeat the same operation in August-September 2007 against another Uzbek
citizen – Yashin Dzhurayev, whose extradition was also denied by the Russian
Prosecutor General’s office. His forced
return to his homeland was averted only with the help of a timely appeal from
the European Court of Human Rights, whose verdict on the inadmissibility of his
expulsion was immediately brought to the attention of all the interested
parties by his lawyers and human rights workers.
A Moscow city court decision to end the administrative
proceedings against Dzhurayev and to order his release from detainment, adopted
in full compliance with the law, confirms the effectiveness of international
mechanisms in forcing Russian authorities to observe the rules of both Russia’s
national and international law.
Summarizing
this section, two quotes from statements made by Russian officials should be
pointed out:
1.
Russian FSB Deputy Director Sergei Smirnov, following a council
session of the Regional Antiterrorist Structures (RATS) of the Shanghai
Cooperation Organization, stated in March 2006: “This year, we detained and
extradited to Uzbekistan
19 people who participate in the
activities of Hizb ut-Tahrir.” In
this manner, Mr. Smirnov practically confirmed the illegal nature of these
extraditions, since decisions on persons’ handover to foreign states falls
under the exclusive jurisdiction of the Prosecutor General’s office. For its part the office, in response to a
Civic Assistance Committee query about the names of the expelled, declared that
it was impossible to reveal their names because it does not keep such lists – a
clear absurdity, since extradition decisions are reached on an individual basis
for each case, and these decisions may be appealed in court.
2. In November 2006, Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev, speaking before the State
Duma, announced that “over the past year, more than 370 emissaries
of international terrorist organizations Hizb ut-Tahrir and the Islamic Movement of Turkestan have been extradited from Russia.” Considering the above-described methods
of extradition and the levels of their “justification” – or rather, the
completely false nature of the terrorism charges appearing in the cases
examined by human rights organizations – it is not hard to draw the conclusion
that the predominant majority of the more than 370 people mentioned by
Nurgaliyev were expelled bypassing the extradition check procedure, and that
they were not presented with the legally guaranteed opportunity to appeal the
expulsion decision.
Expulsion to China
In 2007, the
threat of being forcefully returned to their homeland has spread to the
citizens of China
– followers of the system of spiritual and physical advancement called Falun
Gong (“Falun Dafa,” which translates as “spinning wheel”). Chinese authorities started to persecute the
so-called followers of Falun Gong in 1999.
There are numerous cases of evidence of them being subjected to torture
and other forms of harsh and inhumane mistreatments, degrading to their
personal human dignities.
In terms of
timeframes, the campaign aimed at detaining Falun Gong worshipers for their
subsequent deportation or expulsion
from Russia coincides with the development of “antiterrorist” cooperation of
SCO member-states and the creation of the above-mentioned “single search list
for law enforcement agencies and secret services of the SCO
member-states.” In this manner, another
category of victims of human rights abuses in the fight against “international
terrorism” turn out to be people who engage in self-improvement and have no
relation to political matters.
The particularity of the deportation procedure is that, unlike administrative expulsions, it is regulated by a
corresponding order from the Interior Ministry.
The Federal Migration Service
then makes a deportation ruling on that order, based on a presentation made by
the head of the Interior Ministry’s passport and visa service department, or by
the head of the Interior Ministry’s department on migration affairs. There is no juridical control over the
deportation decisions process, or of its execution. And although the people against whom the
deportation decisions are reached are in a similar situation to those who
undergo administrative expulsion, and while the consequences of administrative
expulsion and deportation are the same, the right to legal assistance and the
opportunity to receive it are substantially different in the two cases. Thus,
the very mechanism of deportation is discriminatory in nature and grossly
violates the rights of foreign citizens that are guaranteed to them by Russian
law.
Thus, On March 28, 2007, in Saint Petersburg, agents
from the territorial Directorate of the Federal Migration Service and
immigration control detained at their place of residence a practitioner of
Falun Gong, Ma Hui, 44, and her eight-year-old daughter. It should be noted that Ma Hui was recognized
by the UNHCR as a person in need of international protection – a so-called “mandated
refugee” of the UNHCR. In addition, she
was in the process of appealing a decision to turn down her request to receive
temporary asylum in Russia,
i.e. she could not have been subject to a forced return to her home country.
In the process
of the emergency execution of a decision on her deportation, Ma Hui was
prevented from receiving legal assistance – her lawyer was barred from seeing
her, she was denied the opportunity to meet with representatives from the UNHCR
or the International Committee of the Red Cross, or to use the assistance of an
interpreter. Her husband Lu Chengun –
another Chinese citizen living in Saint
Petersburg – was unable to meet his wife and daughter
or take away the child.
The consequence
of events leading to the deportation gives reason to believe that it was orchestrated
by the Russian secret services.
On arrival in China, Ma Hui
was arrested and detained for nine days.
After her release, according to her relatives, she arrived home in such
a poor state of health that she could not even speak to her husband by phone.
On May 13, 2007,
also in Saint Petersburg, the Directorate of the
Federal Migration Services agents detained and dragged out from his apartment
before deporting to China
another practitioner of Falun Gong, Gao Chunman – a disabled man who stood in a
registered union to a Russian citizen.
The decision to adopt and execute his deportation was carried out in
ignorance of his ongoing appeal to the migration service to receive temporary
asylum in Russia. He, like Ma Hui, was barred from contacting
his lawyer or from receiving qualified legal help. We have been unable to establish contact with
him after his delivery to his homeland – there is only indirect evidence
received from his relatives that he is terribly frightened and refusing any
outside contacts.
Despite an
appeal to the European Court concerning the cases of Ma Hui’s and Gao Chunman’s
expulsions, and the Court’s extremely quick communication of an appeal
concerning Gao, the Russian authorities did not interrupt the forced return to
their homeland of the Chinese citizens – followers of the teachings of Falun
Dafa. On September 2, 2007, in Moscow, another Falun Gong
practitioner was arrested – Kwan Shimin.
Earlier, he had filed a timely renewal of his visa application – at the
moment of his arrest, his documents were with the Directorate of the Federal
Migration Service for the city of Moscow. This did not prevent Moscow’s Presensk area court from issuing a
ruling on Kwan Shimin’s administrative expulsion, and Interior Ministry
officials from barring his lawyers from meeting their client in order to appeal
the court ruling. Nevertheless, thanks
to the lawyer’s hard efforts, Kwan Shimin’s expulsion was averted – an
appellate court overturned the expulsion decision and ordered his release from
arrest.
One should point
out the unprecedented speed with which dates for the appellate court hearings
were set for both the Uzbek citizens Rustam Muminov and Yashin Dzhurayev, and
the Chinese citizen Kwan Shimin. In all
three cases, the first court hearing and the appellate court date were
separated by only five to eight working days, although usually the wait
stretches for several weeks. In
addition, in the cases of Muminov and Kwan Shimin, law enforcement officials
displayed remarkable ingenuity in order to keep the detained from contacting
either their lawyers of human rights workers.
This may serve as evidence that these expulsions were viewed as
requiring especially careful and rapid enforcement.
Over the past
several years, more than 50,000 foreign nationals have been expelled from Russia every
year. Moreover, some of them are held in the
various detention centers for months while they await the date they to be sent
back to their homeland. Under these
circumstances, the emergency expulsions described above have to be viewed as
the compliance by Russian authorities with orders from their SCO colleagues to
supply them with individuals who are being persecuted on political grounds,
under the guise of a “joint fight against international terrorism.”