public criticism of the leadership of Chechnya. Khasan Khalitov, the Turkish-based founder of the human rights association Vanifond, said that his relatives were also abducted, including his sister and brother-in-law. All those abducted are considered to have been forcibly disappeared. The abductions in December 2020 are consistent with this longstanding pattern of collective punishment, by which the Chechen leadership persecutes entire families, even distant relatives, for the alleged actions of one of their members. In January 2022, Chechen police abducted Zarema Mussaeva, the mother of Ibraghim Yangulbaev who runs an anti-government Telegram channel from abroad. She was dragged barefoot through the snow from her apartment in Nizhny Novgorod and forcibly brought to Chechnya, where she was held incommunicado for two weeks. There she was prosecuted, put on trial, and sentenced to five and a half years in prison on spurious, politically motivated charges of committing an act of fraud and attacking a police officer. Her sentence was later reduced to five years on appeal. In December 2023, a court in Chechnya refused her request for parole. She currently remains imprisoned. Rwanda Noel Zihabamwe had been living in Australia since 2004, when he fled Rwanda after refusing to join the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). In Australia, staff of the Rwandan High Commission in Singapore (which also covers Australia) tried to recruit him to provide intelligence. Following these refusals, Zihabamwe was publicly targeted, including at a meeting with the Rwandan community in Australia in 2017. At the meeting, the Rwandan high commissioner verbally attacked him, telling others at the meeting that there was “a gun pointed at Zihabamwe.” His two brothers, Antoine Zihabamwe and Jean Nsengimana, were targeted by Rwandan security officials, who would regularly visit them including in the middle of the night and question them about Zihabamwe’s work in Australia. In September 2019, the two men (along with Nsengimana’s son) were held in police custody for 10 days, during which they were subject to brutal beatings and torture. According to a witness to the beatings, one of the guards said, “You have someone in your family who refuses to work for us!” Shortly after their release, on September 28, 2019, the two men were again stopped by police, who removed them from a bus. They have not been seen since. Théobald Rutinhunza, a former member of the Rwandan opposition and founding member of the Rwandan League for the Promotion and Defense of Human Rights, currently lives in “WE WILL FIND YOU” 24