He is an Islamist, a killer, a torturer, a polygamist, a defender of blood feuds and forced marriages, an enemy of France, a bitter opponent of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and he described French president Emmanuel Macron as the “leader and inspirer of terrorism” in France. His name is Ramzan Kadyrov and since 2005 he has ruled with terror over the Chechen Republic, a small territory in the North Caucasus which is part of the Russian Federation.
In recent months France's interior minister Gérald Darmanin has helped this notorious leader by sending him several of his 'prey'; Chechens whom Ramzan Kadyrov has not yet managed to have assassinated abroad. In doing so, the French minister is showing scorn for international treaties, conventions on the right to asylum and French law, not to mention this country's long tradition of providing a safe haven. There have been warnings from the European Court of Human Rights and also an adverse ruling from France's own National Asylum Court. The minister does not care one iota.
Since the autumn of 2020 more than ten Chechen refugees or asylum seekers – the exact number of cases is not known – who have been in France for several years, and who in some cases have children, have been deported to Russia. Once they arrive in Moscow they are then handed over by the Russian security services to the Kadyrovtsy, the dictator's own paramilitary force, a group notorious for the horrors they inflict on their prisoners. This process is being managed here by the French minister of the interior amid general indifference, even though France is demeaning itself by breaching fundamental principles.
The clinching factor behind these expulsions was the widespread shock at the murder of teacher Samuel Paty near Paris on October 16th 2020 by 18-year-old Chechen refugee Abdoullakh Anzorov. But the origins of this policy date back to June 2020 when several dozen people from the Chechen community carried out a punishment attack in a district of Dijon in eastern France, sparking three days of violent clashes there.
Ramzan Kadyrov himself only paid lip service to condemning Samuel Paty's murder, preferring instead to insist that “French society often confuses democracy and excessive permissiveness, or the flaunting of relationships that are unacceptable to the values of Islam”. Two weeks after the terrorist attack on the offices of Charlie Hebdo in Paris in January 2015 – an attack carried out because of the magazine's publication of cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed - the Chechen leader organised a demonstration in the capital Grozny in which hundreds of thousands of people were called out to protest against the publication of such images.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
Darmanin, however, used these events to crank up the number of deportations, targeting the Chechen community which is estimated to number around 60,000 in France. The interior minister was in Moscow on November 11th and 12th 2020 to meet his Russian counterpart and to “discuss our cooperation in security matters”. The Russian security services regularly send information to Paris, providing extra details to add to France's security files on potential suspects. Lawyers in France regularly highlight the lack of reliability of these files.
France's interior minister happily takes responsibility for this new policy. On May 6th 2021, in an interview with the right-wing Le Figaro, he boasted of having “asked OFPRA [editor's note, the Office Français de Protection des Réfugiés et Apatrides is the government body responsible for processing applications for refugee or statelessness status] to remove asylum protection for those who are opposed to the Republic's values. In the last three months 147 decisions to remove protection have been made. That's unprecedented.” Gérald Darmanin also made clear his determination to remove residency permits from foreigners whose names are flagged on reports relating to any radicalisation of a terrorist nature. This paves the way to them being deported. “I am asking for them to be stripped of their residency permit and we have obtained that for 200 of them in the last six months, which is a record,” he said.
Yet are the Chechens who have been deported really Islamists, and people who have links to terrorist networks? Lawyers and human rights groups have regularly highlighted the Ministry of the Interior's lack of transparency in this area and the weakness of many of the cases.
“Some expulsion measures are implemented solely on the basis of intelligence gathered and recorded in 'unsigned reports' [editor's note, intelligence reports]. Moreover, this policy doesn't just target refugees who are supposedly radicalised or have links with the terrorist movement, but also people convicted under the criminal law or simply those who have had the right of asylum refused,” noted a joint statement last month from Amnesty International France, the human rights group the Ligue des Droits de l’Homme (LDH) and France's Chechen Committee.
In a May edition of the bimonthly newsletter Desk Russie Sophie Shihab, a specialist on the Caucasus region, looked in detail at the case of Magomed Gadaev, who was deported to Russia on April 9th and who was then taken by Kadyrov's forces to Chechnya where he is today in prison. His deportation order “focussed a great deal on his so-called 'deep roots in the Chechen radical Islam movement'. The only proof was obscure 'links with several individuals from this movement'. Yet, in the opinion of several different people who have known him, while Gadaev has committed some reprehensible acts, being an Islamist ready to die to go to paradise isn't one of them,” she wrote.
It is not just the French Ministry of the Interior's claims about their links to terrorism that give rise to concern; there are also worries over breaches of these individuals' right to claim asylum. A fundamental principle of asylum law is that you cannot – in any circumstances - send a person back to a country where they run the risk of serious harm to their basic rights. That is made clear under the Geneva Convention on Refugees and the European Union's Charter of Fundamental Rights, and also in the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms.
“This prohibition is a non-derogable norm of international law and is affirmed by numerous human rights treaties ratified by France,” noted a joint statement by 12 international and Russia non-governmental organisations who criticised Magomed Gadaev's expulsion. “[The] French authorities’ actions have put him at immediate risk of torture and other ill-treatment and exposed him to a grave danger to his life, in flagrant violation of France’s international obligations prohibiting the return of any person, whatever the circumstances, to a territory where they are at risk of serious human rights violations.”
In this particular case Gérald Darmanin also dismissed the views of France's own National Asylum Court, which on Match 10th said it opposed the Chechen's deportation to Russia. “The Court considered it necessary to check that the authorities would refrain from any measure involving removal to Russia. In fact, the fears of persecution in relation to Russia resulting from the latest decision by OFPRA obliges France to make sure that there is no derogation, either directly or indirectly, from the principle of non-refoulement [editor's note, a prohibition on sending someone back to a country where they may suffer serious violations of their rights]”, as defined by various texts and conventions, it said (read the court's full opinion here).
The risks of such violations were very real in this case. But that did not stop France's highest administrative court the Conseil d'État from approving Gadaev's deportation on May 17th, a decision that Amnesty International described as “surreal and cruel”. Before this case two other Chechens, Ilias Sadoulaev and Lezi Artsouev, were deported from France on March 12th and April 5th respectively. Both vanished after their return to Russia, before emerging again after several weeks, imprisoned in Chechnya with no possibility of receiving visits and with their families having no access to information about them. It was the same story with a man deported from Germany.
Meanwhile Ramzan Kadyrov, who is supported unquestioningly by Vladimir Putin's regime, is strengthening his system of crime and terror in Chechnya with impunity. For years, cases of torture, murder and reprisals against families have been documented. As have been the obligation on women to wear veils, encouragement for polygamy (Kadyrov himself has two wives which is prohibited under Russian Federation law), the introduction of a rigorous Islam which is similar in its conservatism to the Wahhabism of Saudi Arabia, and a barbaric repression of homosexuality.
On November 4th 2019 Ramzan Kadyrov moved to another level when he broadcast on state television a speech given to his government. In this speech he said the country should defend itself by “killing, arresting, terrifying those who sow discord”. He added: “Whoever spreads trouble, gossip, if they're not killed, imprisoned, arrested, nothing good will come of it.”
The Chechen regime's authorities closely monitor the social media accounts of opposition parties in exile. Any deviation in behaviour can lead to threats and reprisals against relatives who remain in Chechnya, and sometimes to assassins being despatched. In May 2020 OFPRA published a report on the “murders and murder attempts targeting Chechen opponents in European countries since 2009”. Half a dozen cases are listed. Among them is the case of the blogger Imran Aliev, who was killed in Lille in northern France on January 29th 2020.
It is with this Kadyrov regime that interior minister Gérald Darmanin has chosen to work. This allows him to highlight in the media the “unprecedented” deportation figures that have been achieved by dint of the government's “determination”. They are figures which simply show how shameful the policy being pursued by the minister is.
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- The original French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter