TNR Watch: Governments are Cooperating to Carry Out Transnational Repression in the Middle East and North Africa

The recent arrest and deportation of a prominent Egyptian Turkish activist to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) highlights the increasingly influential role of the Arab Interior Ministers Council (AIMC), a regional security body, in facilitating transnational repression in the Middle East and North Africa.

Poetic Injustice: On December 28, 2024, Lebanese authorities detained Egyptian Turkish poet and activist Abdulrahman Yusuf Al-Qaradawi at the Lebanon-Syria border. The veteran dissident, who had criticized the governments of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE in a video he filmed in Damascus after the overthrow of Syrian leader Bashar Al-Assad, was apprehended based on an extradition request from the Egypt and UAE. The request was made through the AIMC.

Ten days later, the Lebanese government complied with the extradition request and sent Al-Qaradawi to the UAE, where he is being held incommunicado. Al-Qaradawi’s fast-tracked deportation to a country where he lacks citizenship and which does not share an extradition treaty with Beirut underscores how regional cooperation, including through the AIMC, enables transnational repression and violates legal principles in the Middle East and North Africa.

Track Record: The AIMC brings together the interior ministries of Arab League states to purportedly advance efforts to fight crime and coordinate security policies. However, the body has increasingly exploited broad counterterrorism laws to circulate arrest warrants and extradition requests for political dissidents.

In 2022, Egyptian American activist Sherif Osman spent seven weeks in detention in Dubai after being flagged for arrest by the AIMC; he has linked his detention with an earlier call for Egyptians to protest the government’s human rights violations and economic mismanagement. Shortly after Osman was set free, the AIMC enabled another politically motivated incident. In January 2023, Moroccan authorities snatched Saudi national Hassan al-Rabea at the Marrakech airport and extradited him to Saudi Arabia, where his family has been targeted for its Shia identity. Similarly, Khalif al-Romaithi, a Turkey-based Emirati businessman, was detained in the Amman airport in May 2023 and unlawfully deported to UAE after his name appeared in an AIMC database.

Redress: Reforms to the AIMC are necessary to better protect dissidents in the Middle East from transnational repression. The AIMC lacks transparent review mechanisms and appeals processes for those targeted to contest charges. As UN Special Rapporteurs have noted, member states also fail to uphold the principle of nonrefoulement—a core principle of the 1951 Refuge Convention holding that refugees should not be returned to a country where they face serious risk to life or freedom—when considering extradition requests. The UAE should release Al-Qaradawi immediately and allow him to return to Turkey, and policymakers should adopt policies against transnational repression across the Middle East.