Questions Over Kyrgyz National's Extradition to Uzbekistan

The confusion surrounding Kazakstan’s decision to extradite Kyrgyzstan national Khurshid Komilov to Uzbekistan rather than his own country was compounded by official silence on the issue and some unclear media reporting. 

Komilov, 27, had been in Almaty for nearly a year when he was picked up in a police sweep looking for illegal immigrants. He was detained without charge by the National Security Committee, KNB, for three months, in which time a representative of the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, UNHCR, interviewed him.

The head of the KNB detention unit in Almaty told Komilov’s lawyer that he was sent to Uzbekistan on September 8 on the instructions of the Kazak prosecution service.

The Kazak prosecutor general’s office refused to comment on the extradition, as did its Uzbek counterpart.

After news of Komilov’s extradition came out, Central Asian news sites reported that he should not have been extradited, especially to a third country and especially one that is known for the use of torture, because UNHCR had accorded him refugee status.

NBCentralAsia correspondents have ascertained that Komilov was in fact stripped of his refugee status in August.

“Headquarters [UNHCR] in Geneva came to the conclusion that the refugee mandate was given to [Komilov] without proper grounds,” says Denis Jivaga, who heads a UNCHR programme providing legal aid to refugees at the Kazakstan Bureau for Human Rights and Rule of Law. “Many media outlets were unable to clarify and check this information, and they started making a sensation out of the extradition, although there was no cause for this.”

Suhrobjon Ismoilov, head of the non-government Expert Working Group in Tashkent, said it was unfair to accuse journalists of misrepresenting the facts when access to information was so limited in cases of this kind.

“If this information had been freely available, it would have been possible to take responsibility for it,” he said. “In these situations, however, we only have indirect sources – family members of detained persons, and the asylum-seekers themselves.”

A media-watcher agreed that officials were rarely forthcoming with information, so occasional inaccuracies were inevitable.

This article was produced as part of IWPR’s News Briefing Central Asia output, funded by the National Endowment for Democracy.