Security services across the former Soviet Union are increasingly collaborating to send Central Asian nationals – often critics and others with legitimate asylum requests – home to countries where they face a real risk of torture and abuse, according to a new report by London-based Amnesty International.
In the July 3 report, "Return to torture: Extradition, forcible returns and removals to Central Asia," the watchdog exposed the ease with which Central Asian states secure the return of their citizens from other members of the Commonwealth of Independent States, a post-Soviet club. Few CIS nations wish to damage relations by refusing extradition requests, the report says. Moreover, perceived mutual interests in fighting terrorism come long before human rights in this region, even though the threat is often exaggerated.
“Twenty years after the break-up of the Soviet Union, old collegiate ties, common institutional cultures and the shared perception across the region of the threat from Islamist extremist groups bind together the successor institutions to the Soviet KGB,” John Dalhuisen, Amnesty International’s Europe and Central Asia Program Director, said in a press release. “These renditions would not be possible without the complicity of public officials in the judicial and law enforcement structures. Nor would they be possible without CIS states willfully disregarding the absolute ban on torture and their obligation not to return people to countries where they may be at risk of torture.”
Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, two countries where torture is reportedly rampant, are making the most requests.
Though these states are signatories to international human rights prohibitions on returning people to countries known to practice torture, treaties that override any extradition or other cooperation agreements, Amnesty says Central Asian countries and their neighbors, such as Russia and China, prioritize adherence to regional cooperation and mutual assistance agreements within the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and the CIS.
Amnesty singles out two troubling treaties in particular: The 2001 Shanghai Convention on Combating Terrorism, Separatism and Extremism, and the 1993 CIS Convention on Legal Assistance and Legal Relations in Civil, Family and Criminal Matters (The Minsk Convention). These treaties are, the group says, used to justify the extradition of suspected members of banned Islamic groups, a convenient catch-all. The same treaties are also used to extradite home critics, those suspected of membership in banned or unregistered religious organizations, as well as human rights activists, journalists, lawyers, and political rivals.
Kidnapping is employed, as well. “When extraditions from Russia and Ukraine are delayed or obstructed, following injunctions by the European Court of Human Rights, these countries increasingly collude in abductions and forcible returns with their Central Asian counterparts," the report says.
Abductions and attempted abductions of asylum seekers, refugees or other Central Asian nationals by their respective security services operating freely on one another’s territory and in Russia and Ukraine are taking place so regularly that they amount to "a region wide extraordinary renditions program" and they have been described by the European Court of Human Rights as “an absolute negation of the rule of law," the report said.
Comparing the trend to the notorious "briefly secret" American renditions program in the years following the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States, Amnesty International said: "Something less centralized, and less coordinated, but no less widespread is taking place across the former Soviet Union – and there is nothing secret about it."
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