Народное движение Адат
Brief description
1ADAT is a Chechen opposition group and Telegram channel. It publishes information on the crimes of the Kadyrov regime and human rights abuses in Chechnya.
Most of the people involved in the group — with the notable exception of its leader, Ibragim Yangulbayev, who first revealed his involvement in the group in April 2022 (Kavkaz Realii, 2022) — are anonymous, largely for security reasons.
Origins and goals
The group was founded in April 2020 as a “public movement that is against dictatorship. We are ordinary citizens who have united to help one another.” It advocated that residents of Chechnya provide it with information that could be passed to human rights activists and journalists (Telegram, 2021).
The group’s name is a reference to Chechen traditional law. It claims to be seeking Chechen independence from Russian occupation.
In late 2020, the group claimed that it was run by seven administrators, most of whom were based in Chechnya (OpenDemocracy, 2020). However, the group’s main figure, Ibragim Yangulbayev, lives in exile. It continues to claim close contact with people living in Chechnya.
Leadership
- Ibragim Yangulbayev
Reaction of the Chechen authorities
In September 2020, 19-year-old Salman Tepsurkayev — for a short period, one of the Telegram channel’s moderators — was abducted in Gelendzhik, Krasnodar Kray. He was transferred to Chechnya, where he was filmed being sexually violated and tortured, after which he disappeared. The European Court of Human Rights found the Russian authorities responsible for Tepsurkayev’s disappearance and that his rights had been violated. Lawyer Olga Sadovskaya and 1ADAT admitted in August 2022 that Tepsurkayev had almost certainly been murdered after the video was filmed (OpenDemocracy, 2020; BBC Russian Service, 2022).
In January 2021, Groznyy’s Zavodskiy District Court declared posts on the Telegram channel to be extremist. The following July, the Russian Ministry of Justice declared the organisation to be extremist and banned its activities in Russia (Kavkaz Realii, 2022).
In January 2022, the Chechen security services abducted Zarema Musayeva, the mother of Yangulbayev, in Nizhniy Novgorod and forcibly transported to Chechnya. She was subsequently charged with fraud and assaulting a police officer. The charges were widely seen as politically motivated retribution for the activities of her sons. In July 2023, a Chechen court sentenced her to five and a half years in prison. In 2024, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the Russian authorities had failed to protect her family in the face of threats from the Chechen regime; that Musayeva had been ill-treated by the police; and that her detention was arbitrary and retaliation against her family (European Court of Human Rights, 2024).
