STRASBOURG, France (CN) — Europe’s chief rights court gave the go-ahead Friday for Moscow to deport two members of the Uzbek ethnic minority to Kyrgyzstan, finding the group has not been systemically mistreated.
Citing reports from the United Nations Human Rights Committee and Amnesty International, the European Court of Human Rights sided with Russia, which has been attempting to deport Kyrgyz citizens Turdyvay Khasanov and Shavkatbek Rakhmanov to their home country for nearly 10 years.
Both men, wanted for unrelated crimes, fled Kyrgyzstan to avoid prosecution. Khasanov left the country in 2010 while being investigated for embezzling money from the company he worked for. Rakhmanov, who left in 2012, was wanted for his role in a series of racially motivated attacks where he and others barricaded a highway, stopped passing cars, robbed the occupants and lit the cars on fire.
At the time, Kyrgyzstan was engaged in a yearlong civil conflict between the Kyrgyz people and Uzbeks, The conflict killed some 2,000 people and forced more than 100,000 to flee to neighboring Uzbekistan.
Both men were convicted in absentia and have been fighting extradition from Russia.
“The applicants’ ethnic identity makes them part of a particularly vulnerable group in Kyrgyzstan,” their lawyer, Nadezhda Yermolayeva, told the Strasbourg-based court during hearings in 2021.
By 2015, the pair had exhausted their legal avenues in Russia and took their fight to the European Court of Human Rights. The court was created in 1953 by the European Convention of Human Rights to protect the civil and political rights of its 47 member states.
Kyrgyzstan, a landlocked, ex-Soviet state, has a spotty human rights record and unrest in the country has forced out a series of political leaders. Several human rights organizations who intervened in the case were critical of both the situation in Kyrgyzstan as well as the extradition process in Russia. The International Commission of Jurists and the European Council on Refugees and Exiles questioned in their written pleadings whether Moscow had conducted “a real and effective investigation of the situation” before ordering Khasanov and Rakhmanov to be deported.
Ultimately, the Strasbourg-based rights court felt it was safe enough for the men to be returned to their home country.
“The court reiterates at the outset that despite expressing concern about repeated incidents of ill-treatment in Kyrgyzstan, it has never found a sufficient basis to conclude that the general situation was such as to preclude all removals to that country,” the court's Grand Chamber wrote.
The ruling is one of the first to involve Russia since Moscow quit the Council of Europe, which oversees the court, last month. Following the Kremlin's invasion of Ukraine, 42 of the 47 member states voted to suspend Russia.
The Russian Federation joined the Council of Europe in 1996 and has been on the receiving end of more complaints in the rights court than any other member state. Russia’s departure leaves its citizens with little recourse when their government violates their human rights, but proceedings that began before it left will continue.
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