Austria deports Chechens who risk recruitment in Ukraine war

VIENNA: Austria is deporting Chechen asylum seekers on security grounds back to Russia, where they risk being forcibly recruited to fight in the Ukraine war, court documents seen by AFP show.

Authorities say they pose a “state security” threat but rights groups say their deportation is a violation of international law. Amnesty International has repeatedly urged European countries to halt the expulsion of asylum seekers and refugees from the Muslim-majority republic in Russia, saying it “violates international human rights obligations”.

Chechen exiles say they are unfairly associated with religious extremism. Austria this year expelled two Chechens who had applied for asylum after receiving summons to report to the Russian military for conscription.

Vienna argued that they were not under a “credible” threat of being drafted. According to Austrian authorities, both applicants are too old to be conscripted, which they say only applies to Russian men aged 18-30 -- a claim disputed by rights groups.

Officials also claimed that they could “escape mobilisation... by settling in Moscow”. Based on “the results of police investigations into terrorism” and religious extremism, the Chechens “would undoubtedly threaten national security” if they remain on Austrian soil, authorities argued, without providing details.

Since commercial flights between the EU and Russia were cut by sanctions over Russia´s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the expulsions are being carried out by aeroplane via Serbia, Azerbaijan and Georgia.

Austria does not publish detailed statistics on the expulsions of Chechens, who are either Russian citizens or stateless. The Austrian interior ministry did not respond to queries by AFP. While there has been no cooperation with Russia since its invasion of Ukraine, Austria “takes Moscow´s lack of response to its deportation notices as silent approval”, according to the documents.

To many Austrians, “Chechen automatically means terrorist”, complained Rosa Dunaeva, a Chechen activist based in Vienna. She said Chechens are also targeted because they “rarely have the means to pay for a lawyer” to defend themselves.

But “authorities are well aware, throughout Europe, that those who are deported can be recruited to fight in Ukraine” if their families do not pay a large sum of money, Dunaeva claimed, “whether they are 18 or 60 years old”.

In 2006, the EU concluded an agreement with Russia facilitating the return of convicted suspects. Despite Brussels´s opposition to Moscow´s invasion of Ukraine, Austria has never called the accord into question.

Following the murder of a schoolteacher in France by a Chechen refugee in 2020, Austria set up a special police unit to monitor its Chechen community. Extraditions were speeded up after Austria suffered its first jihadist attack, also in 2020.

In 2024, Amnesty International called on Europe to stop returning people to states in the North Caucasus such as Chechnya due to “the new threat of mobilisation in the armed forces”.

The human rights situation in Chechnya is so severe “that the families are afraid to make those cases public”, Natalia Prilutskaya, a specialist on Russia at the NGO, told AFP.

“There is no safe space for returnees anywhere in Russia,” she said. Mobilisation concerns all men “considered to be in reserve, aged up to 70 years old”. The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) condemned France in 2022 for deporting Chechens to Russia, citing article three of the European Convention, which prohibits torture.

Protection under that treaty cannot be waived “even in the event of public danger” or “links with a terrorist organisation”, it said. Some 250,000 Chechen exiles live in Europe. Austria -- a country of 9.2 million -- is home to between 30,000 and 40,000 of them, according to official statistics: the largest Chechen diaspora community per capita. The small North Caucasus republic was ravaged by wars from the 1990s and is now controlled by Kremlin loyalist Ramzan Kadyrov, who has suppressed all opposition.