Web-site: http://www.memo.ru/

Civic Assistance Committee

Ul. Dolgorukovskaya, 33, 6 Moscow 127006 Russia

tel. (495) 251 5319; 8-499- 973 54 43, 8-499-973 5474

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”[1] 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.[2] 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.”

[1] Information about this was reported by the RIA Novosti news agency on April 29, 2006, http://www.rian.ru/world/relations/20060429/47046638.html.

[2] According to FMS data, 260 people were deported and 88,260 expelled from Russia in 2004; in 2005 – 15 and 75,756, accordingly; in 2006 – 11 people deported from Russia and 55,800 subjected to administrative expulsion.