Chechen activists Abubakar Yangulbaev and Said Dzhumaev joined a rally in support of Mansur Movlaev and Yulia Emelyanova, held as part of the "Russie-Libertés" forum in Paris. Forum participants spoke out against their potential extradition from Kazakhstan to Russia.
Yangulbaev and Dzhumaev held placards urging the Kazakh authorities to halt the process. Russian human rights defenders, politicians, public figures, and representatives of the cultural community also joined the initiative.
Movlaev has been held in custody in Kazakhstan pending extradition since May 2025. The country's Prosecutor General's Office previously decided to extradite him to Russia; however, the Supreme Court of Kazakhstan suspended the execution of this decision pending a final ruling on his asylum application.
In September, a Kazakh cassation court found no violations in the decision to deny Movlaev asylum. Following this, he attempted suicide twice: first in a Kazakh pre-trial detention center, and later in a hospital.
Movlaev was detained in Chechnya in 2022; in January 2023, he fled the republic and ended up in Kyrgyzstan. He was detained there in August of that year at Russia's request, but after his release, he left the country to avoid being sent back to Russia.
Said Dzhumaev, who supported Movlaev, rose to prominence after a rally in support of Alexei Navalny in Moscow in January 2021, during which he clashed with security forces. In August of that year, he was sentenced to five years in a penal colony for using violence against a government official. Jumaev served his full sentence and was released in July 2025.
Another participant in the protest, Abubakar Yangulbaev, has been added to Rosfinmonitoring’s list of terrorists and extremists. His mother, Zarema Musaeva, is serving a sentence in a penal settlement in Chechnya. In December 2025, Ramzan Kadyrov stated that Musaeva had been detained due to the Yangulbaev family's social media activities.
Protests against the extradition of Movlaev and Emelyanova had previously taken place in Tbilisi, Ljubljana, Tokyo, and New York. On September 29, 153 human rights defenders and organizations called on the authorities of Kazakhstan not to extradite them to Russia.
