Lately we have often read in the news about cases in which a UN Committee has demanded that Russian citizens not be extradited to their homeland, because they face torture and ill-treatment there.
These include the cases of Yulia Emelyanova and Mansur Movlaev in Kazakhstan, and Mikhail Timofeev in Georgia.
An “Aliens” lawyer explained when you can count on the help of a UN Committee, how exactly this protection mechanism works, and why in practice it is more effective if you are detained in Europe.
When a person is about to be extradited or deported to a country where they face danger, one of the last remaining remedies is a complaint to the UN Committee against Torture or the UN Human Rights Committee. Such complaints can only be filed against states that have formally accepted the relevant procedure.
Let’s look at the states that interest us:
— The US and Belarus do not allow complaints against them to be considered by either of the two UN Committees.
— Complaints can be filed with both Committees against 23 of the 27 EU member states. The exceptions are Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Romania: complaints against these countries are accepted only by the Human Rights Committee.
— All the states of the former USSR except Belarus allow complaints against them to be considered by the UN Human Rights Committee.
— Six post-Soviet states — Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Moldova, Russia and Ukraine — also allow complaints to be considered by the UN Committee against Torture.To file a complaint, you must exhaust all available domestic remedies, except where they are clearly ineffective or the proceedings are unreasonably prolonged. Together with the complaint, you can ask the Committee to apply interim measures — suspending the extradition until the complaint is examined on the merits. Examining a complaint can take several years, while interim measures can be granted within a few days of its receipt.
A state that receives an urgent Committee request not to extradite is obliged to comply with it. However, the state bears no real liability for violating such requests, and compliance rests solely on the authority of the UN and on countries’ desire to act in good faith. For this reason, the likelihood that such measures will be respected is often quite low.
Thus, over the past ten years in the post-Soviet space, with the exception of the Baltic states, it has not been possible to find reliably confirmed cases in which a UN request specifically prevented an extradition. There are several successful cases in which UN Committees issued such requests, but there is no legal basis to claim that they were what caused the extradition to be refused. One such example is the case of Chabuka v. Georgia, No. 861/2018.
At the same time, UN Committee requests to suspend removal have been deliberately and flagrantly violated by Russia (the case of Ferid Yusub, No. 2947/2017), Belarus (the case of Alexander Lapshin, No. 2945/2017), Ukraine (the case of T.T., No. 2985/2017) and Kazakhstan (the case of Abdussamatov and Others, No. 444/2010; the case of X v. Kazakhstan, No. 554/2013).
In EU countries the situation is the opposite: it is practically impossible to find cases in which UN Committee requests were directly violated. In addition, Europe has the European Court of Human Rights, which can also demand that a removal be suspended.
At present, lawyers are watching especially closely three unresolved cases in which a UN Committee demanded that people not be extradited to Russia: those of Yulia Emelyanova and Mansur Movlaev in Kazakhstan, and Mikhail Timofeev in Georgia. As of October 2026, none of the three has been extradited to Russia. However, it is still unknown how these cases will end and whether the UN’s requests will influence the extradition decisions.
The situation in Kazakhstan is particularly alarming: the courts there have not included the Committees’ requests in the legal reasoning of their decisions, and the Prosecutor General’s Office has stated that in Movlaev’s case they are merely advisory and do not prevent his extradition. Even Mikhail Timofeev’s release in Georgia cannot be legally and convincingly attributed specifically to the UN Committees’ measures, although they probably had some influence on the authorities’ decision.
Still, complaints to the UN Committees are not pointless.
When domestic remedies have been exhausted and the extradition decision is practically impossible to challenge, a complaint to the UN requesting interim measures may be one of the last available ways to obtain an independent assessment of the situation. Even a temporary suspension of extradition or deportation can give a person and their defenders time to present new evidence of the danger, seek a review of the decision, or find other lawful ways to prevent a return to a dangerous country. In such circumstances, additional time and international attention can be decisive.
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