The United States announced on Monday, July 20, that Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov was no longer authorized to enter American territory, accusing him of " gross violations " of human rights in his country.
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Washington has "a great deal of credible information that Ramzan Kadyrov has been responsible for gross human rights violations for more than ten years, including acts of torture and extrajudicial killings, " the department said. State in a press release. Visa applications from Mr. Kadyrov, his wife Medni or their two daughters Aishat and Karina, will be refused, said US diplomacy, which is based on a law sanctioning foreign officials suspected of violating human rights.
The United States " encourages " other countries to do the same, the statement added. Washington had already declared Chechen Prime Minister Muslim Khuchyev undesirable in the United States. Ramzan Kadyrov, 43, has held with an iron fist for more than ten years the Russian republic of the Caucasus, Muslim and conservative, ravaged by two separatist conflicts in the late 1990s.
Numerous extrajudicial executions
Coming to power in Chechnya after the assassination of his father Akhmad in a 2004 bombing, he orchestrated the fight against the separatists and the jihadists at the cost, according to human rights defenders, of countless abuses and extrajudicial executions . Several Chechen dissidents have been murdered in recent months in Europe. Mamikhan Oumarov, 43, a voice critical of the Chechen regime and who had requested political asylum in Austria, was shot dead in early July near Vienna.
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In January 2020, Imran Aliev, a 44-year-old blogger, was found stabbed dead in a hotel room in Lille (northern France). In February, Toumso Abdourakhmanov, a Chechen blogger critical of Ramzan Kadyrov, was attacked in Sweden. Mr. Kadyrov is close to Russian President Vladimir Putin, and Russia has vowed to respond to Washington's decision. " It will be difficult to take reciprocal measures, but we will reflect, " Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova told Russian news agencies.