Persecution over the Chechen opposition Telegram channel 1ADAT

Since 2020, the 1ADAT Telegram channel has published messages criticising Chechnya’s leader Ramzan Kadyrov and his inner circle, posts about armed conflict in the Caucasus, and information on the persecution of Chechens by Kadyrov’s forces. The channel also voices radical ideas about resisting the regime and about Chechnya seceding from Russia. A court in Grozny declared information from the Telegram channel to be prohibited for distribution in Russia.

In September 2020, Chechen security forces abducted 1ADAT chat moderator Salman Tepsurkaev. Later, a video emerged online showing a completely naked young man, expressing remorse for being an administrator of a channel that criticises the authorities, and sitting on a bottle while saying: “I am passing the baton to everyone involved in the 1ADAT Telegram channel, especially the administrators.” Whether Tepsurkaev is still alive, and his whereabouts, remain unknown.

On 28 December 2021, “Committee Against Torture” lawyer Abubakar Yangulbaev was detained and interrogated; his devices were seized. Afterwards, screenshots of his conversations with his brother Ibragim were published online, in which their connection to the 1ADAT channel is mentioned. Abubakar Yangulbaev described the correspondence as partially fabricated. Not long before this, their relatives had been detained in Chechnya.

On 20 January 2022, security forces burst into the flat of Abubakar’s parents—retired judge Saidi Yangulbaev and Zarema Musaeva. She was detained and taken to Grozny on the pretext of being questioned as a witness. There, she was first arrested for disobeying a police officer and then sent to a pre-trial detention facility, accused of using violence against the security officer who detained her. Afterwards, the family’s relatives again ceased communicating.

Kadyrov and other regional officials label the Yangulbaev family as terrorists, as well as the human rights defenders and journalists supporting them. They have received death threats. “We have no task more important than to find you and cut off your heads,” officials declared. Previously, Kadyrov himself made a similar statement on social media: “This family faces either prison, or the grave.”

Ibragim Yangulbaev, who is said to be an administrator of 1ADAT, is no longer in Russia; he left after being released from a pre-trial detention facility in Chechnya in 2018. In January 2022, he was declared wanted on charges of justifying terrorism and was arrested in absentia. Saidi Yangulbaev left with his children at the start of his wife’s arrest. Later, he was stripped of his retired judge status, which had granted him immunity from prosecution.

Ibragim has said that the Yangulbaev brothers and their father were tortured in Chechnya in 2015. He also suffered torture during his detention in 2017.