The Brandenburg Higher Regional Court has stopped the extradition of a Chechen to Russia.

Magomed D., a 58-year-old man of Russian nationality, has lived in Brandenburg with his wife and children since 2015.

In his North Caucasian homeland, he is accused of having a good three grams of heroin in his pocket in 2013.

A court in Groznyj, the capital of the Chechen Republic, issued an arrest warrant and Moscow requested extradition. 

Marlene Grunert

Editor in politics.

  • Follow I follow

    Friedrich Schmidt

    Political correspondent for Russia and the CIS in Moscow.

    • Follow I follow

      The man, who faces several years imprisonment in Russia, claims that he belongs to a family at odds with the Kadyrov clan in Chechnya.

      The heroin was foisted on him.

      The Brandenburg Higher Regional Court initially declared the extradition to be admissible.

      The judges neither recognized political persecution nor saw any reason to investigate the Russian allegations.

      Constructed allegations

      If the judiciary has declared an application for extradition to be admissible, the Federal Ministry of Justice and the Foreign Office have to decide. There the extradition was approved - despite all the concerns that exist especially in cases related to the North Caucasus. The situation in Chechnya is particularly bad when it comes to human rights. For years, the German government has demanded assurance from Moscow in appropriate cases that those affected will be brought to justice outside the region and imprisoned.

      In 2017, Russia declared that it could no longer make such promises. At the request of the FAZ, the Foreign Office said that since then a distinction has been made between “general crime”, which is prosecuted “as fairly as in the rest of Russia”, and “special cases”. This included political cases. In fact, the political nature of a procedure is rarely known. Often fabricated allegations mask the real motives of the prosecutors.

      After the Foreign Office had approved the extradition of Magomed D., his lawyer applied to the court for another decision on the admissibility. The judges followed the lawyer’s request, but not citing the human rights situation in Russia. They referred, among other things, to the excessive length of the proceedings, which would meanwhile violate the man's right to a fair trial.