Yesterday, the President of the Court decided to apply Rule 39 of the Rules of Court and ordered France not to remove a group of eleven Afghan nationals to Afghanistan. The group is being held in administrative detention pending their removal on a flight organised by France and the United Kingdom. They lodged applications last week complaining that removal would violate Article 3 ECHR (real risk of torture or ill-treatment by the Taliban) and Article 4 of Protocol 4 (prohibition of collective expulsion of aliens).
In a somewhat comparable case decided last year – Sultani v. France – the Court held that expulsion would not violate the above-mentioned rights.
For a more extensive analysis of the legal consequences of interim measures, see my earlier post here.
