Three refuges face deportation back to China

On 13 and 18 May 2021, ethnic Kazakhs from Xinjiang with refugee status Kaisha #AKAN, Murager #ALIMULY and Kaster #MUSAKHANULY were formally denied citizenship on the basis of having a criminal record for illegal border crossing.

Also, they were denied a travel document allowing refugees to travel to other countries. The formal reason – amendments to the Law of the Republic of Kazakhstan “Convention relating to the Status of Refugees” which facilitate obtaining a visa and allow refugees to travel abroad. These amendments will not come into force until 1 January 2022.

The refusals were signed by: Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs #ZAPPAROV Arystangani Rasilkhanovich and First Deputy of Police Department of Almaty region #ORAZBEKOV Yerzhan Sembaevich.

Kaisha AKAN, Murager ALIMULY and Kaster MUSAKHANULY were officially granted asylum for 1 year in October last year. Their term in Kazakhstan expires in five months. They can neither stay in Kazakhstan nor leave for another country to avoid deportation to China, where they will face mortal danger. Given this fact, Kazakhstan could, as an exception, grant them one of these documents.

Murager ALIMULY and Kaster MUSAKHANULY were among those who, during a press conference on 14 October 2019, exposed the lies of the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic Kazakhstan that “there are no ethnic Kazakhs in Chinese concentration camps”. They spoke publicly about their own tragic experiences and brutal torture they endured in a concentration camp in Xinjiang and about the attempts by Chinese authorities to re-incarcerate them in the camp.

Also, on 21 January 2021, unidentified persons attacked Kaisha AKAN and Murager ALIMULY in two cities at once. There is reason to believe that it was a political order to intimidate and eliminate witnesses of torture in concentration camps in Xinjiang, unwanted by the authorities of Kazakhstan and China.

Earlier, Kaster MUSAKHANULY and Murager ALIMULY were each sentenced to one year’s imprisonment in Kazakhstan, ruling that the time spent in custody would count as part of their sentence calculated on a day-for-two basis. On 22 June 2020 they were released from prison in Semey. It was thanks to pressure from Kazakhstan and the international community that they were not extradited to China: https://cutt.ly/bjHFheK

Kaisha AKAN also fled to Kazakhstan in 2019 and was sentenced to a six-month suspended sentence for “illegal border crossing”. In addition, she said that her relatives in China were pressured, threatened and demanded that she stop telling the truth about what happened in China. https://cutt.ly/EjHD9rA