The European Court of Human Rights on Thursday issued a “temporary measure”, that is, an emergency measure, by means of which it asks France not to proceed with the deportation of the Chechen to Russia, because it believes that he may be subjected to torture there, reports AFP. .

Headquarters of the ECtHRPhoto: CEDO

The man, born in 1980, claimed at the ECtHR that he was arrested in 2004 in Russia, interrogated and tortured several times for alleged connections with members of the Chechen rebels.

Released under amnesty, he said he lived underground before entering France in 2014.

He and his wife were granted refugee status by the National Asylum Court in 2018, which was then revoked in 2019 after the Director General of Ofpra (the French Office for the Protection of Refugees and Stateless Persons) requested a review.

In 2020, the prefect of Morbihan in the west of France issued an obligation to the couple to leave the national territory and specified Russia as the country of destination.

“This decision does not contradict the provisions of Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights,” the prefect wrote at the time.

His decision was confirmed by the Administrative Court and then by the Administrative Court of Appeal.

But the European judges unanimously recognized that the French courts “underestimated the risks of ill-treatment” to which the Chechen would be subjected if returned to Russia.

They ruled that such a return would constitute a “violation of Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights”, which states that “no one shall be subjected to torture or to inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment”.

They therefore decided to apply a “preventive measure”, an emergency measure which provided “that the applicant should not be deported”. France has three months to appeal and take the case to the Grand Chamber, the ECHR’s highest court.

In its decision, the ECtHR cited several documents from the US State Department, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, which testify to the use of torture by the authorities against persons detained in Russia.