MANAMA (Dispatches) – Emirati airline RoyalJet may have violated a European Court of Human Rights injunction and UN conventions on human rights by carrying out the “wrongful” extradition of a Bahraini dissident from Serbia, a group of human rights groups has said.
Ahmed Jaffar Mohammed Ali, 48, was extradited on January 24 under an international arrest request dating back to 2015, despite an ECHR ruling he could not be sent home pending further investigation.
The Bahrain Institute for Rights and Democracy (BIRD) cited the Strasbourg-based ECHR as saying Ali should not be extradited before February 25 to give it time to examine “possible risks of torture and/or ill-treatment that the applicant would face if extradited to Bahrain”.
In a letter to Royal Jet on Monday, 11 human rights groups said an A6-RJC plane belonging to the private airline – which is based in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates – flew Ali from the Serbian capital Belgrade to Bahraini capital Manama where he was handed over to the Bahraini authorities.
“We fear that by using your company’s aircrafts to carry out Mr Ali’s wrongful extradition, you may have played an active role in violating the ECHR’s interim measures and article 3 of the UN Convention against Torture, which enshrines the principle of non-refoulement,” the groups said in the letter published on the website of Americans for Democracy & Human Rights in Bahrain (ADHRB).
“You have also violated the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, under which business enterprises’ responsibility to respect human rights requires that they seek ‘to prevent or mitigate adverse human rights impacts that are directly linked to their operations, products or services by their business relationships, even if they have not contributed to those impacts’.”
Ali, who had previously been twice sentenced to life in prison in Bahrain in absentia, applied for asylum in Serbia in November 2021, arguing that he risked torture and potentially death in his homeland.
Meanwhile, Bahrain’s main opposition group, the al-Wefaq National Islamic Society, says Al Khalifah regime forces have committed dozens of violations against Bahraini nationals in the last week of the month of January, amid ongoing repression in the tiny Persian Gulf country.
Al-Wefaq, in a statement released on Monday, announced that it has recorded numerous violations against citizens and prisoners of conscience between January 22 and 28, and the figure stands at over 50 cases.
The statement referred to the arbitrary detention of political dissident Ahmed Jaafar Mohamed Ali as the most egregious violation, after he was deported from Serbia and handed over to Bahraini authorities.