A legal court docket in Vienna on August 5 refused Tajikistan’s request to extradite Shavkat Muhammad, a member of the banned Nationwide Alliance of Tajikistan, alongside together with his 77-year-old mom, Sharofat Sharifova, and his brother Bilolidin Sharifov. Tajik authorities accuse the three of extremism; the household calls the prosecution political.
No written ruling has been revealed, and the account of the listening to comes from opposition figures who had been within the room.
That is the fourth refusal to come back out of a single Tajik submission. In April, the Inside Ministry despatched Austria’s Justice Ministry information on 18 members of exiled opposition organizations, a file Leila Nazgul Seiitbek examined for the Diplomat in June. On June 24, a Vienna court docket took up the case of Islamic Renaissance Get together of Tajikistan (IRPT) member Firdavs Shukurov. The conduct Dushanbe cited in its personal case supplies was Shukurov holding an anti-Rahmon banner at an October 2021 demonstration in Vienna, partly documented in a YouTube video. The rally had been licensed and Shukurov held refugee standing. 5 days later the identical court docket blocked the return of a 49-year-old lady wished since 2018 for public calls to vary the constitutional order.
Austria has not at all times drawn a agency line on these sorts of requests, and the distinction seems to have been procedural. In March 2020 it eliminated Hizbullo Shovalizoda after rejecting his asylum declare, a migration choice fairly than an extradition ruling. He was detained on arrival in Dushanbe and sentenced in June to twenty years for treason and participation in an extremist group in a closed trial. An Austrian court docket later invalidated the removing, discovering that the asylum choice had relied on outdated details about circumstances in Tajikistan, and obliged Vienna to carry him again. He’s nonetheless in jail.
Elsewhere in Europe, we see comparable patterns in which there’s a divide between extradition requests and migration violations, whatever the actuality on the opposite finish in Tajikistan.
On June 20, Germany deported Asadullo Boboev, 54, and his 19-year-old son to Dushanbe. Boboev was positioned in pretrial detention on arrival. A court docket in Geldern had licensed their pre-removal detention on the premise of expired residence standing and repeated failure to depart voluntarily. Boboev had individually been given till July 1 to fulfill a German court docket {that a} legal case awaited him, a deadline that handed whereas he was already in Tajik custody. His lawyer submitted dozens of pages documenting the danger of return, which the court docket disregarded, in line with exiled opposition chief Sharofiddin Gadoev.
Human Rights Watch counts Boboev because the fourth documented Tajik opposition activist deported by Germany since 2023 and detained on touchdown. Abdullohi Shamsiddin, whose German case turned on a failure to register with the migration service, received seven years at house for liking a social media submit; Bilol Qurbonaliev acquired ten and Dilmurod Ergashev eight. Poland deported Farrukh Ikromov in April 2024 after Germany returned him beneath the Dublin guidelines; household and opposition sources say a closed court docket gave him 23 years, a conviction Tajik authorities have by no means confirmed. Sweden returned Farhod Negmatov and his three underage daughters in December 2024. Negmatov was detained on touchdown.
The equipment behind these requests is outsized for a rustic of 10 million. Leaked Interpol information obtained by Disclose and the BBC positioned Tajikistan third worldwide for crimson notices in circulation in late September 2024, forward of China in seventh; Interpol publishes no such rating. The Inside Ministry of Tajikistan stated in July that 4,225 Tajik residents are on the Interpol wished record, 403 of them added since January, and that Russia handed over 373 within the first half of 2026. Neither determine is independently audited. Freedom Home, which counts Tajikistan among the many ten worst perpetrators of transnational repression, discovered that terrorism or extremism accusations seem in additional than 46 % of documented circumstances worldwide since 2014.
These two routes ask totally different questions. Extradition places Dushanbe’s claims in entrance of a decide, and in Shukurov’s case the accusation amounted to a permitted protest. Elimination places the migrant’s personal paperwork (or lack thereof) in entrance of a decide as a substitute; the prohibition on returning anybody to an actual danger of torture nonetheless binds, but it surely arrives as one thing the individual going through deportation should set up, on a schedule the deportation units, fairly than as a case the requesting state has to make.
Dushanbe’s Austrian file has produced 4 refusals and no handovers; its German returns have required no file in any respect.
