On November 1, the French human rights organizations Habitat-cité and Comité Tchétchénie sent an appeal to the UN, declaring the inadmissibility of the deportation of Chechen refugees from France. The authors of the document, in the drafting of which lawyers from the Memorial Center for Human Rights participated, called on the UN to remind France of its obligation to protect ethnic and religious minorities, ensure their safety, abolish ethnic criteria in the fight against radicalization and terrorism, and create a body that would receive complaints of discrimination and protect refugees from abuses of administrative measures.
The appeal states that over the past five years the situation of Chechen refugees in France has changed significantly. The terrorist attacks at the Charlie Hebdo editorial office and the Bataclan theater in 2015, riots in Dijon and especially the murder of teacher Samuel Paty, who showed caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad, in 2020 led to a deterioration in the attitude of French society towards the Chechen diaspora.
In 2017, the country passed the “Strengthening Republican Principles Act,” which gave the Minister of the Interior the power to establish surveillance of those suspected of posing a threat to state security and public order. People are forced to stay within one geographical area and are regularly summoned to the police, where they are interrogated about how often and what kind of mosques they visit, and about their attitude towards jihadist movements in the Caucasus and Syria.
But even before the adoption of the law, Chechens were faced with the fact that they were being closely monitored. The police are keeping secret files on them, access to which is closed to lawyers. It is becoming increasingly difficult for Chechens to obtain refugee status and are increasingly being deported, thereby putting them at risk of being detained or killed in their homeland.
This, for example, happened to 19-year-old Daud Muradov, who was expelled from France in December 2020 under the pretext of “a threat to state security.” Moreover, the French authorities handed over to the Russian security forces documents with personal statements from Daoud and his family members to the migration service, given during the procedure for obtaining asylum in France. It contained the names of high-ranking Chechen Ministry of Internal Affairs officials responsible for mass abductions and torture.
After deportation to Russia, Muradov was kidnapped by FSB officers. He was forced under torture to sign a confession to terrorist activities. He later retracted this testimony. On February 6, 2022, Muradov’s family in France was informed that the young man had died in a hospital in Grozny, where he had been taken by ambulance from a pre-trial detention center.
In May 2021, French human rights organizations Amnesty France, the French League of Human Rights and Comite Tchetchenie issued a joint statement calling on the country's authorities to stop the deportation of Chechen refugees to Russia.
“The French authorities are deliberately violating international and European rules, which categorically prohibit the return of a person to a country where he is at risk of torture or ill-treatment,” they said.
On August 30, 2022, the European Court of Human Rights recalled that citizens of Chechen origin who have received refugee status fall into a “particular risk” group if returned to the Russian Federation.
Human rights activists who sent a note to the UN called on it to remind France of international obligations that prohibit the expulsion of people to humiliating and cruel treatment. Especially to Russia, expelled from the Council of Europe and recognized as a state with a terrorist regime.