Kazakhstan’s authorities are seeking to extradite Kazakh opposition-minded blogger and journalist Zhanara Akhmetova from Ukraine.
Kyiv’s Shevchenkivsky District Court on Nov. 2 refused to release Akhmetova despite the fact that reformist lawmaker Svitlana Zalishchuk officially vouched for her.
Akhmetova believes the case to be a political vendetta by Kazakh dictator Nursultan Nazarbayev. Ukraine’s Prosecutor General’s Office denied the political character of the case.
“Over the past month, Ukraine has risked getting the image of a state that arrests and extradites well-known opposition figures to authoritarian regimes allied to (Russian dictator Vladimir) Putin at the same time as Ukraine is fighting for the release of its own political prisoners (in Russia),” Zalishchuk said. “In Kazakhstan, she was fined for her Facebook posts.”
Zalishchuk said that Akhmetova had been on a hunger strike in protest against what she sees as a political case for seven days.
The lawmaker also said that Akhmetova had been “kidnapped” by law enforcers with procedural violations, and none of the documents given by the prosecutors had been properly notarized.
Akhmetova fled Kazakhstan for Ukraine in March and applied for a political asylum. She was arrested by a Ukrainian court in October.
In 2010, Akhmetova was sentenced by a Kazakh court on fraud charges to a 7-year term but her imprisonment was postponed until 2021 due to her son’s infancy.
Kazakh independent journalist Aydos Sadykov, who is based in Kyiv, told the Kyiv Post he does not know if the case is political because Akhmetova was sentenced before she started her political activities and because she is linked to a party connected to Kazakh authorities.
“But I’m absolutely against Zhanara Akhmetova’s extradition to Kazakhstan – a country where there is no independent judiciary, and there are tortures and atrocious conditions in prisons,” Sadykov wrote on Facebook.
This is not the first time Ukraine is cooperating with post-Soviet dictatorships in the extradition of opposition journalists.
In October, a Ukrainian court arrested Azeri opposition journalist Fikrat Guseinov. He was released after Boris Zakharov, head of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group, and People’s Front lawmaker Mykola Knyazhytsky vouched for him.
Guseinov is accused of illegally crossing Azerbaijan’s border in 2008, when he left the country after being kidnapped and severely beaten.
In September, a Ukrainian court arrested Uzbek opposition journalist Narzullo Okhunzhonov.
Okhunzhonov, who was subsequently released, is accused of getting a $2,000 bribe in 2009.
Okhunzhonov and Guseinov say the cases were fabricated by the Uzbek and Azeri regimes due to their criticism of them.
Ukrainian authorities have also been accused of helping other post-Soviet dictators and leaders.
In October Ukrainian authorities also deported three Georgian citizens associated with ex-Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili without a court warrant and are planning to deport 20 more Georgians. The three Georgians, one of whom fought Russian-separatist troops in the Donbas, say they were kidnapped, beaten and illegally transported to Georgia by Ukrainian authorities.
In July Femen activist Anzhelina Diash was arrested for protesting against Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko in Kyiv. Diash faces two to five years in prison on hooliganism charges in what she believes to be a political case.
In January Zakharov said that Ukrainian authorities were preparing the extradition of 11 Russian volunteers fighting for Ukraine.
Pyotr Lyubchenkov, a Russian emigrant being prosecuted in his native country for writing a pro-Ukrainian post, has been repeatedly denied asylym status by Ukraine’s State Migration Service before getting it through a court order, and Ukrainian prosecutors were preparing his extradition. A representative of Ukraine’s migration service even claimed in 2016 that there was the rule of law in Russia, and there was no political persecution there.
In 2016 Ukrainian authorities arrested Moldovan businessman Vyacheslav Platon, annulled his Ukrainian passport, claiming it was fake, and extradited him to Moldova. Platon, who says his passport is valid, sees the case as a political vendetta by Moldovan oligarch Vladimir Plahotniuc and his extradition as part of a deal between Plahotniuc and Poroshenko.
