The United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention (WGAD) has been seized of the case of Mohamed ABDELLAH, a former staff sergeant in the Algerian gendarmerie who was expelled from Spain to Algeria on 21 August 2021, where he was held incommunicado, tortured and then sentenced to life imprisonment by a military court. The communication is directed against both States, and primarily against Spain, which completed an expulsion procedure in ten days without giving him any access to a judge, although it knew of the risk of torture he faced. The case is emblematic of the practices of transnational repression used by the Algerian authorities against political opponents and human rights defenders in the diaspora.
A whistleblower already threatened on Spanish soil
Mohamed ABDELLAH, 38, had left the Algerian army in November 2018 after exposing cross-border smuggling of fuel, drugs and weapons involving civilian and military officials. An asylum seeker in Spain since April 2019, holding a regularly renewed permit, he continued his disclosures there openly and had become a figure of the Hirak in exile. On 3 August 2020, two men approached him in a street in Alicante, threatened to kill him and ordered him to return to Algeria. He filed a complaint with the Guardia Civil the very next day: the Spanish authorities therefore knew, a year before expelling him, that a foreign State was targeting him even on their own territory.
An expulsion in ten days, with no judicial review
Spain returned the whistleblower to Algeria despite the risks, without even having received a formal extradition request. On 11 August 2021, Mohamed ABDELLAH was arrested at the immigration office in Vitoria, where he had gone to register a change of address, believing his asylum application was still pending when it had in fact been rejected on 14 July without being notified to him. Only the following day did the administration notify him of the rejection and open an urgent expulsion procedure for a “very serious offence”. Immediately placed in administrative detention, he was not given the time needed for his lawyers to lodge appeals and have his case examined by a court. Indeed, the administrative removal decision, signed on 20 August and notified to his counsel that same evening, was carried out on Saturday 21 August at around four in the morning, while an appeal was still pending and two requests for interim measures had just been rejected. He was forcibly put on board a vessel chartered for the occasion from Almería to Ghazaouet, two ports between which no regular line operates.
“Spain had a judicial route available and chose an urgent administrative procedure, which provides neither a period for voluntary departure nor an appeal with suspensive effect,” said Rachid Mesli, Director of Alkarama. “No judge examined the lawfulness of this expulsion before it was carried out. It is an emblematic case of transnational repression of a whistleblower by the Algerian military authorities, facilitated by a democracy.”
This “preferential” procedure, known as tramitación preferente, is expedited and deprives any appeal of suspensive effect. The European Court of Human Rights holds that enforcement which excludes any possibility of obtaining a stay from a judge renders the remedy ineffective. The prohibition on returning a person to a real risk of torture, in Article 3 of the Convention against Torture, admits of no exception, even on grounds of national security.
An expulsion contrary to international law and based on dangerous religious profiling
The entire Spanish procedure rests on a single document, a report by the domestic intelligence services which the whistleblower’s lawyers were never able to challenge. The report does not accuse Mohamed ABDELLAH of any act of violence or call to violence. Instead, it establishes his dangerousness by association, on the basis of discriminatory assumptions about his presumed religious and political ideas. Thus the Spanish administration, without ever independently verifying the facts, accused him of belonging to Islamist movements and inferred his dangerousness from the fact that he addressed “the Muslim community (…), especially young people”. The Spanish authorities concluded, without any material evidence or critical analysis of the facts, that his alleged “membership of a radical Islamist organisation” showed that he “has not accepted the constitutional values” of Spain.
“This reasoning rests on the stigmatising prejudice that any political activism by Muslims is inherently dangerous or anti-democratic, whatever the person’s actual political or religious ideas, and on the perception of Muslim men as a ‘threat’ by many European democracies,” Rachid Mesli added. “The authorities of many countries in the Arab region have understood how this discriminatory mechanism works and regularly use it with particular cynicism.” Before the Algerian courts, all the accusations of support for terrorism or radicalism that had been passed on to Spain to justify the summary removal were dropped, in favour of charges aimed exclusively at his exposure of corruption within the high command.
From torture at the Antar centre to a life sentence handed down by a military court
On disembarking, Mohamed ABDELLAH was handed over to the military intelligence services and taken to the centre known as “Antar” in Algiers, long identified as a place of torture. He was held there incommunicado for more than forty-eight hours, then brought before a prosecutor without a lawyer. Taken back to Antar in September and October 2021, he was subjected there, according to his testimony, to sleep and food deprivation, electric shocks with a taser and the “wet cloth” torture, or simulated drowning. The intelligence services tried to force him to record false, filmed “revelations” for national television, which he refused. When he reported these facts in open court in January 2022, the judge refused to take note of them on the ground that the detaining institution was military, and no investigation was opened.
Prosecuted in more than seventeen sets of proceedings for the same facts, he was acquitted of the terrorism charges that had been used to obtain his removal from Spain. On 16 April 2024, the military court of Blida sentenced him to life imprisonment for “undermining the morale of the troops” and “high treason”, on account of his publications exposing corruption. He remains in solitary confinement, deprived for five years of any telephone contact with his family, who stayed in Spain: a ban with no legal basis, to which he is reportedly the only detainee in the facility to be subjected.
A dangerous precedent for human rights defenders seeking refuge abroad
Mohamed ABDELLAH’s case is not an isolated one. He now shares his fate in Blida military prison with Mohamed BENHALIMA, another military whistleblower whom Spain forcibly returned seven months after him, in March 2022, by an identical procedure, and who has been sentenced to death. In its submission on arbitrary detention in the context of transnational repression, sent to the Working Group on 1 July 2026, Alkarama documents these two forced returns from Spain to Algeria alongside other transfers between States of the region, and highlights “the risks faced by targeted individuals when they are outside the territory of the State seeking to reach them”. Transnational repression “refers to measures taken by a State to silence and intimidate a person located abroad” and “can take various forms, including arbitrary arrests, expulsions, forced returns, secret detention, pressure on family members, and the misuse of international cooperation mechanisms”. The precedent weighs heavily on all those who seek refuge in Europe: a human rights defender can be handed over there, without any judge ruling, to the State they have fled.
Questioned by the UN Committee against Torture about the two cases in July 2023, Spain replied that its government had “at no point” violated the principle of non-refoulement, relying on the immediately enforceable nature of its decisions: an answer about the enforceability of its acts, not about the risk of torture. In its list of issues adopted in 2026, the Committee again asks Spain whether an appeal against these decisions has suspensive effect, and notes that it has received no reply despite a reminder sent in April 2025.
Alkarama’s action
Alkarama calls on the Working Group to find that Mohamed ABDELLAH’s deprivation of liberty, uninterrupted since his arrest in Spain, is arbitrary, and that it engages the joint responsibility of Spain, which made it possible through his arbitrary and unlawful forced return, and of Algeria, the direct perpetrator of the incommunicado detention, the torture and the conviction. It asks the Working Group to recommend that Algeria release him immediately and unconditionally, quash the conviction handed down by the military court and, at the very least, grant him a guaranteed and non-discretionary regime of visits and communication with his family.
The communication is, however, addressed above all to the Spanish authorities, responsible for serious violations of their own constitutional law and of their obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights, the Convention against Torture and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Spain must, at the very least, acknowledge the unlawfulness of the removal. Durable protection status must be granted to Mohamed ABDELLAH’s wife and children, and the Spanish embassy in Algiers must regularly monitor his situation. The provisions that deprive appeals against removals invoking a risk of torture of suspensive effect must be reformed. Finally, an independent investigation must be opened into the circumstances of this forced return, the State’s responsibility officially acknowledged and the harm fully repaired.
What happens next?
The Working Group, composed of five independent experts, may be seized without prior exhaustion of domestic remedies. It transmits the allegations to both governments, which have sixty days to respond; in the absence of a reply, it may render its opinion on the basis of the information provided by the source alone. The opinion is adopted at one of its three annual sessions, communicated to the governments and then to the source, and made public.
Both States are then invited to report on the measures taken to follow up on it. Priority registration and consideration at the earliest opportunity have been requested, as well as transmission of the file to eight other United Nations mandates, including those on torture and on enforced disappearances, with a view to a possible joint communication to both States.