Marko Štambuk arrived at Belgrade district prison on a Monday morning in late January, only to be told his client was no longer inside. “Immediately I knew something had happened,” he said.
Štambuk, a lawyer, had spent the previous Friday frantically obtaining an injunction from the European court of human rights (ECHR) demanding Serbian authorities halt the extradition of his client, Ahmed Jaafar Mohamed Ali, a Bahraini dissident. This banned the Serbian authorities from extraditing Ali until late February, and warned them that doing so would constitute a rare breach of the European convention on human rights.
After a frantic search, Štambuk discovered that two Serbian police officers had taken Ali from the prison to Belgrade airport that morning at 4am, and handed him to Bahraini officials on the tarmac. Just after 5am, Ali was flown directly to Manama on a charter flight operated by Royal Jet, a luxury airline headed by a member of the Abu Dhabi ruling family and part-owned by Presidential Flight, the company responsible for transporting members of the Abu Dhabi government.
“The shock was intense,” said Štambuk, taken aback by Serbia’s decision to go ahead with the extradition. “He was sent back to Bahrain, I don’t know what will happen to him. If he’s sentenced to life in prison again, I don’t assume he will survive for much longer,” he said.
Bahrain considered Ali a high-value suspect, convicting him in absentia on three separate counts of terrorism in 2013 and 2015. Ali, a labour activist, insisted he was innocent in a letter to a Serbian court, writing that he could prove that he was not in Bahrain at the time the alleged offences occurred. “I don’t have any relation [sic] with the case,” he pleaded.
Ali’s case shows how anti-democratic regimes are increasingly able to target exiled dissidents, exporting their domestic crackdown on dissent. His extradition also provoked questions about the role of Interpol, amid mounting concerns about abuse of the policing organisation’s “red notice” system intended to flag criminals overseas. The high-profile extradition also represents the first case of its kind under the Interpol presidency of Emirati security official Ahmed Naser Al-Raisi, accused of involvement in torture by former detainees.
Interpol is a supranational police force that provides investigational support to member countries, notably through information sharing within its red notice system. Bahrain’s interior ministry described Ali’s capture from Serbia as a “joint operation”, with Interpol, while its public prosecution later said that Ali was “extradited from Serbia with the help of Interpol”. A spokesperson for Interpol emphasised that its general secretariat, based in Lyon, was not informed of Ali’s extradition, and that responsibility for the operation fell to Interpol’s National Central Bureaus, or NCBs, the domestic point of contact for Interpol in each member country.
“The return of fugitives and wanted persons is a bilateral matter between member countries and the Interpol general secretariat is not involved in this process,” the spokesperson said. “Interpol’s general secretariat cannot instruct NCBs on whether to arrest an individual or refrain from doing so, whether to engage in extradition proceedings, etc. Such decisions are exclusively within the discretion of the competent national authorities of member countries.”
Interpol’s role in Ali’s extradition remains uncertain. “In a clear effort to legitimise this illegal extradition, Bahrain has portrayed this as a cooperative operation with Interpol. This is a serious manipulation and abuse of international policing, which has destroyed the life of a dissident. This case is indicative of the inherently flawed nature of Interpol’s broken red notice system which has for too long been left vulnerable and open to abuse,” said Sayed Alwadaei of the Bahrain Institute for Rights and Democracy.
Whatever role Interpol ultimately played in Ali’s extradition, his arrest in Belgrade last November was a direct result of an Interpol red notice against him issued in 2015. Ali soon found himself on a journey through the Serbian court system towards extradition to Bahrain, with few opportunities to convince the Serbian authorities of the risks he faced. “The red notice was the starting point for him, for this entire story,” said Štambuk. “In all cases that I’ve worked on, whether asylum or extradition, the red notice is always the starting point.”
Interpol issues an estimated 10,000 red notices each year, according to criminal justice watchdog Fair Trials, who wrote to Interpol’s general secretariat in 2017 to warn that Bahrain’s use of the red notice system to target dissidents “could amount to a violation of Interpol’s constitutional rules on political neutrality and human rights”.
Ali’s red notice, issued in 2015, likely occurred up to a year before Interpol established what a spokesperson described as a specialised taskforce to screen requests from member countries before publication. The taskforce comprises a team of up to 40 people, but little else is known about the screening process. When Ali’s lawyers contacted the Commission for the Control of Interpol’s Files (CCF) in 2019, a separate body which reviews data contained in red notices, the CCF told them to “contact the relevant national authorities” in Bahrain concerning accusations against him.
“We don’t doubt that the abuses of the red notice system are a minority of the total,” said Bruno Min of Fair Trials. “But if for example Interpol were able to say that they reject a certain number of red notices per year, you could be satisfied that the screening process actually works. At the moment they’re not giving us that kind of information.”
The Bahraini authorities accuse Ali of multiple terrorism-related charges, including bomb-making and complicity in the murder of three policemen, including one from the UAE. Rights groups say that similar charges are often levelled at protesters who took part in anti-government protests in 2011, and many such as Ali fled in the intervening years. Three other men also accused of murdering police officials in the same case were executed in 2017, after a trial where UN observers accused Bahraini officials of extracting false confessions using torture. One later labelled the executions “extrajudicial killings” based on an “unfair trial and flimsy evidence”.
As Ali’s case moved through the Serbian justice system, he wrote three letters to the courts in an attempt to convince them of the risks he faced if extradited. “I fear for my life and the wellbeing of my family,” he wrote last December, telling them that he had come to Serbia to seek asylum hoping that they would be safe. He was intimately aware of the risks, having described the torture he had endured almost a decade earlier in Bahrain to Human Rights Watch.
But the red notice left him unable to shake the accusation that he was a wanted criminal. On 18 January, Serbia’s justice ministry approved Ali’s extradition order to the Gulf state. This came after a year of increasingly warm relations between the two countries, including the first state visit by a Serbian president when Aleksandar Vučić flew to the Bahraini capital Manama in March last year and “committed to further deepening political and economic ties between Serbia and the Kingdom of Bahrain”.
“I absolutely believe that the [Serbian] government resolves extradition cases in different ways depending on which countries they’re working with, and not thinking about the life of the person involved,” said Sonja Tošković of the Belgrade Centre for Human Rights, who pointed to multiple international conventions banning extradition to countries where detainees risk abuse. “You’re playing with human life. It’s devastating,” she said.
The Guardian understands that the judge overseeing Ali’s case received a call from the Serbian interior ministry the day before his extradition. An interior ministry official told the judge that Interpol understood a temporary injunction had been issued by the European Court of Human Rights, intended to stall Ali’s extradition until late February. The interior ministry official wanted to know how to proceed with the case, and whether they had permission to remove Ali from prison in Belgrade. The judge penned a memo to transfer the decision about whether to extradite Ali to the justice ministry, in line with procedure. Time was of the essence: the private jet to collect Ali had landed at Belgrade seven minutes before the judge received the call, having left Abu Dhabi for Manama and flown to Belgrade the same day.
Serbian authorities were later forced to explain to the ECHR why they chose to ignore the interim measure, and violate the convention on human rights. In a statement, they said the extradition went ahead as “a consequence of a short time between the issuance of the interim measure to the time of the extradition of the applicant”.
“Serbia and Interpol have effectively destroyed Ahmed’s life with this illegal extradition,” said Alwadaei. “They acted in clear violation of international laws. Serbia breached its international obligations. Once more, Interpol has allowed itself to be abused by an authoritarian regime.”
A coalition of rights groups also wrote to Royal Jet to demand answers about why it had allowed airline to be used to extradite a dissident. “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,” they said. The Serbian justice ministry, the UAE foreign ministry and Royal Jet did not respond to requests for comment.
Bahraini authorities previously told the Guardian that Ali faced no risk of mistreatment on return home, and referred further questions to a recent statement by public prosecutors. This states that “the Public Prosecution sought the death penalty for the accused,” but the court upheld Ali’s three life sentences and added a fourth.
Alwadaei and Min are among those calling for Interpol to examine its handling of Ali’s case in order to prevent similar problems in future. An Interpol spokesperson said the general secretariat “is constantly reviewing, assessing and updating its procedures to ensure the greatest level of integrity in the system, and trust in its work”, when asked if the case could provoke any internal review.
