More than a dozen civil society organisations have urged an Arab League-led security body to stop facilitating the extradition of dissidents and human rights defenders in the region.
The organisations, led by the Geneva-based MENA Rights Group, wrote in an open letter that the Arab Interior Ministers Council must “undertake urgent reforms, in consultation with civil society, to align its legal framework and systems with international human rights law”.
The letter comes as the AIMC concluded its 42nd annual conference in Tunis amid what the organisations said is “a rise in transnational repression”.
In the past four months, there appears to have been a significant increase in the use of AIMC-circulated warrants to extradite or attempt to extradite individuals believed to be sought by Arab states for political reasons.
These recent cases include the extradition of Egyptian-Turkish poet and activist Abdul Rahman Yousef al-Qaradawi from Lebanon to the UAE in January over a three-minute video he posted on X.
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That same month, Salman al-Khalidi, a Kuwaiti activist and founder of the UK-based Kuwaiti Refugees Association, was extradited from Iraq to Kuwait after posting videos on social media challenging the legitimacy of Kuwait’s current rulers.
Meanwhile, in Saudi Arabia, Egyptian national Ahmed Kamel, who participated in nonviolent anti-government protests in Egypt in 2011 and 2014, has been detained since November and faces imminent extradition to Egypt.
“Nobody knows what’s going to happen, or at least they’re not telling us what’s going to happen,” his wife, Sherryne Grace Badaoui, told Middle East Eye.
“It’s just really surreal that people can just pluck somebody you love out of your life this way, for no reason at all.”
Extraditions for “crimes of a political nature” are explicitly prohibited under the AIMC’s legal framework but are still occurring in practice, according to the 15 signatories of the letter released this week.
“Lacking an oversight body to prevent the abuse of its systems, the AIMC has become the perfect tool for Arab League states to request politically motivated extraditions,” they said.
The AIMC did not respond this week to MEE’s request to comment over concerns about its lack of oversight and use of circulated warrants to pursue individuals for political reasons.
