HRW: Refugee escapes TJ after YouTube plea (Gadoev)

The report states that this 18 March 2019 Human Rights Watch commentary, published on the Lacuna Blog, recounts the case of Tajik political activist Sharofiddin Gadoev, 33, who had fled repression and lived with his wife in the Netherlands with refugee status since 2015 before being kidnapped by Russian officials during a February 2019 visit to Moscow and flown to Tajikistan. According to the report, Gadoev and his cousin Umarali Kuvvatov had founded Group 24, a peaceful opposition group popular among Tajik migrant workers in Russia that called for democratic reforms; Kuvvatov was shot dead on the street in Istanbul on 6 March 2015 in circumstances pointing to Tajik government involvement. The report says Russian officials placed a cellophane bag over Gadoev’s head and tape over his mouth, bypassed passport control at Moscow airport, and put him on a flight to Dushanbe where Tajik officials beat him so violently during the four-hour flight that his clothes were soaked with blood on arrival. It records that interrogators told him: “You have three options: cooperate, go to prison for 25 years, or die.” The report describes staged videos of his “happy” return, a pre-recorded plea released by colleagues on YouTube on 19 February, pressure from a Dutch parliamentarian and the German embassy in Dushanbe acting for Dutch interests, and an impending early-March visit by Luxembourg’s foreign minister. It concludes that on 2 March Gadoev was put on a flight to Frankfurt and then returned to the Netherlands.