Fire-Rescue ‘Hero’ Deported By France As Europe Accused Of Failing Central Asians Facing ‘Transnational Repression’

ALMATY, Kazakhstan — A video shot in the French town of Montereau in April 2020 shows a group of men scale three floors of an apartment building engulfed in flames in a bid to rescue an old man trapped on his balcony.

One of the men is able to leap through the thick black smoke onto the balcony and lift the pensioner so that the others can drag him to an adjacent balcony not affected by the fire.

The anxious townsfolk watching along with firefighters on the street burst into cheers and applause.

Part of the rescue team that day was Muhsinjon Ahmedov, an Uzbek citizen that French authorities on November 14 deported to Uzbekistan to face immediate arrest on extremism charges that he says are fabricated.

Ahmedov now faces up to 20 years in an Uzbek prison.

On December 7, France’s top constitutional court for administrative cases, the Conseil d’etat, ruled that the deportation was carried out illegally, that Ahmedov was due compensation from the French state, and that the government should now do everything possible to return him to France.

That intervention by the court has likely come too late.

In the meantime, Ahmedov’s treatment — which includes a claim of torture at the hands of his French minders — is likely to be remembered as one of the more shocking instances of officials in a European country facilitating what experts call “transnational repression.”

And despite the authoritarian governments in Central Asia having gained a hard-earned reputation as leaders in this field of persecution, such incidents seem to be increasingly common. “We are witnessing a massive rise in these deportations,” said Nadezhda Ataeva, chairwoman of the Paris-based Association of Human Rights for Central Asia (AHRCA).

“We have information that Sweden alone deported 83 Uzbeks in August of this year,” she said. “Kyrgyz citizens, too. This is a total lack of responsibility from the countries of the European Union that I believe can only contribute to real radicalization in the Central Asian region.”

Ataeva’s AHRCA was one of three rights organizations, along with the Norwegian Helsinki Committee and the International Partnership for Human Rights that released a statement on December 13 condemning the French authorities for deporting Ahmedov in violation of the European Convention on Human Rights.

The statement cited reports that at least 12 people have reportedly been tortured to death in detention facilities in Uzbekistan in the last three years.

Long Journey To France

Ahmedov has known Ataeva, an Uzbek exile herself and a career rights defender, for about eight years. They first came into contact in 2015, shortly after an event that was to change the woodworker’s life and separate him from his wife and two children for nearly a decade.

It was during the month of Ramadan that year that Uzbek police raided Ahmedov’s home, detained him, and held him incommunicado for several days in an interrogation that included regular bouts of torture. The officers were seeking a confession that he was a member of Hizb ut-Tahrir, an Islamic group deemed extremist by the Uzbek authorities.

Under President Islam Karimov, who died in 2016, the raids on pious Muslims were systemic, contributing to the U.S. State Department designating Uzbekistan a “country of particular concern” in regards to religious freedom — a status the country has since managed to shake off under Karimov’s hand-picked successor, Shavkat Mirziyoev.

Ahmedov did not give the officers what they wanted, and they subsequently released him, covered in cuts and bruises, without any charge. But when Ahmedov’s mother saw her son’s injuries, she insisted they file a complaint with prosecutors against the officers who had tortured him. Seemingly in retaliation, police opened an extremism case against Ahmedov.

The basis for the charges, Ahmedov would later tell Ataeva, was a video the officers claimed they had found on his phone during the interrogation. Ahmedov insists the video was planted by police in order to incriminate him.

The clip showed footage of a speech by Tahir Yuldashev, a man associated not with Hizb ut-Tahrir but rather the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, an extremist group dedicated to overthrowing Karimov and establishing an Islamic state. That Yuldashev had died in 2009 and was hardly a relevant hero to any would-be-radicals in Uzbekistan didn’t seem to bother investigators.

Facing such serious charges, even Ahmedov’s lawyer advised him to run.

He fled first to St. Petersburg, but after hearing that Tashkent had issued a warrant for his arrest, fled further over marshland to Estonia and the European Union, where he was detained and held in a deportation center for more than a year before being released.

Although Estonian authorities allowed him to work, they did not grant him asylum, so he fled to Germany and to France in 2019. It was in Montereau, near Paris, where he found irregular work and shared beaten up accommodation with several Chechen exiles.

Their acts of heroism during the apartment fire brought him and his housemates praise in the French media, medals from Montereau’s mayor, and a near 30,000-strong petition demanding the authorities allow them to permanently live and work in France.

Instead, Ahmedov was refused asylum and placed on a list of people that threaten the security of the French state. He then spent three months in detention before beginning a long stint under police observation.

Broken System

Central Asian nationals declared enemies of their homelands typically face a long journey to legalization in European host countries, and this can leave them vulnerable if they are to commit even minor migration violations.

Leila Nazgul Seiitbek, a lawyer and chairwoman of the Vienna-based nonprofit Freedom for Eurasia, argued that “there is a tendency in Western countries not to delve into the essence of the charges brought against the dissident” who is seeking asylum. “They see [alleged] extremist or terrorist crimes and the extradition or deportation machine immediately starts working,” she said.

For Central Asians seeking asylum in the EU, such charges — typically backed by Interpol notices issued by their home governments — see them automatically entered on the Schengen Information System (SIS), significantly lowering their chances of asylum.

But what constitutes extremism in Central Asia often doesn’t tally with the definition used by host countries, Seiitbek told RFE/RL. As an example, she cited the pending case of a Tajik currently facing deportation from Slovakia. The Central Asian country’s case against the dissident centered in part on a Facebook post in which the dissident allegedly wrote, “May the authorities of Tajikistan burn in hell.”

“A statement like that, while not pleasant, does not constitute extremism, much less terrorism,” Seiitbek said. And yet it is for this kind of “extremism” — online activity critical of their government — that multiple Tajiks have in recent years been sentenced to long jail terms following extradition from Europe.

Only last week, the Gruppa 24 opposition group said that one of its activists, Bilol Qurbonoliev, was sent back to Tajikistan from Germany in connection with a migration violation, becoming the second Tajik political activist known to have been deported by Berlin this year.

In the cases of both Qurbonoliev and the activist deported in January, Abdullohi Shamsiddin, “German authorities overlooked Tajikistan’s track record of dealing with returned exiled activists and disregarded the principle of non-refoulement,” according to Grady Vaughan, a research associate focusing on transnational repression for the human rights watchdog Freedom House.

That Qurbonoliev participated in protests against Tajik President Emomali Rahmon during his official visit to Berlin in September is likely to make him especially vulnerable to retaliatory treatment, Vaughan warns.

In addition to the need for a more context-driven approach to migrants facing potential transnational repression, experts have advocated for reforms to be made at Interpol — the international policing organization based in Lyon, France, that Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan are members of.

But while “the organization has attempted to improve its internal processes to set up checks on political abuse” in the issue of notices, “it is difficult to concretely gauge Interpol reforms because Interpol is opaque in terms of releasing data,” Vaughan told RFE/RL.

Any Hope For Ahmedov?

Ahmedov, who is currently incarcerated in his native Ferghana region in Uzbekistan, is not the first Central Asian to be deported to his homeland and then have a court in the former European host country rule that the extradition was illegal.

In 2020, the Austrian Supreme Court invalidated the decision of officials in Vienna to deport opposition activist Hizbullo Shovalizoda, who was subsequently sentenced to 20 years in prison on extremism charges after his arrival in Dushanbe.

The ruling, which noted that the decision had been based on outdated information about the situation in Tajikistan, hasn’t led to Shovalizoda’s release.

Another Tajik activist deported to his homeland in 2019 after being violently abducted on a trip to Russia, was successfully returned to the Netherlands — his country of permanent residence — but only after a massive outcry over his case.

On December 5, the U.S. Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee released a statement noting that committee Chairman Ben Cardin had sent a letter to Rahmon, “urging him to cease acts of domestic and transnational repression against political opponents and religious minorities.”

Tajikistan has not publicly responded to the letter.

During the last month of his stay in France, Ahmedov was incarcerated again, this time in a deportation center. The reason for his detention, according to Ataeva, was his violation of an order governing his freedom of movement, which prevented him from entering the metropolitan area of Paris.

French police were at the time conducting security checks in the wake of massive pro-Palestinian demonstrations being held in the capital. The suspicions of the French authorities regarding Ahmedov remain classified, and his lawyer Lucie Simon has been unable to gain access to his case.

Ataeva remains convinced that “there is nothing in their investigation — they were just waiting for him to slip up so that they could deport him.”

In a blog post published on November 23, Simon wrote that the extradition had violated two rulings of the European Court of Human Rights that made clear the dangers facing Ahmedov in the event of his deportation to Uzbekistan. That French authorities acted as rapidly as they did, in total contravention of the rulings, represented “a turning point in migration policy,” Simon argued.

Even more shocking are allegations from Simon that French authorities have not yet responded to a complaint that Ahmedov was on November 7 choked with a cloth by guards in the deportation center, apparently after he complained about conditions in his cell.

Additionally, his deportation process on November 14 took less than five hours, Simon wrote.

Defending the expedited process in court, a representative of the Interior Ministry cited the fatal knife attack at a school in Arras, northern France, in October, and the calls by the Palestinian group Hamas — designated a terrorist organization by the United States and the European Union — for “days of anger” amid its war with Israel.

“[Ahmedov] has never been convicted of acts of terrorism or even indicted. He knows neither Hamas nor the attacker of Arras. But dressing up political discourse with fear is the best way to trample our freedoms in the name of an illusory security,” Simon wrote.