Panel Backs Russian Scientist’s Appeal for Political Asylum

A Russian nuclear scientist who strongly opposed his government’s sale of technology to Iran has legitimate fears about returning home and should be reconsidered for political asylum, a federal appeals panel ruled.

In a unanimous 3-0 decision, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals on Thursday ordered immigration officials to again take up the case of Alexei Chouchkov, a Russian citizen who worked for Atom Kor, a government-funded research organization.

The appeals court found Chouchkov’s assertions of threats and intimidation to be credible, and that they rose to the level of political persecution. The Board of Immigration Appeals cast doubt on whether Russian government officials were behind the tactics.

“Any reasonable finder of fact would be compelled to conclude that Chouchkov was the victim of persecution such that his life or freedom was threatened on account of his political opinion,” Judge Milton I. Shidur wrote for the court.

More specifically, the court noted that the threatening incidents--including a car theft and car accident while Chouchkov was still in Russia, and an attack on his mother once he left--could not be considered coincidental.

Further, Chouchkov worked for an arm of the Russian government and was investigated for his job by the KGB, which supervised and proposed the 1993 deal with Iran and all deals involving nuclear power.

Chouchkov, who is also Jewish, said he objected to the Iran deal because Iran is a terrorist country and, as a Jew, he did not want the nuclear technology used against Israel. He says he told his supervisors he would try to stop the deal, and one of them told him he would be “very sorry about this.”

Chouchkov, 43, and his wife, Kondratieva, left Russia on a tourist visa to Germany in 1993, then fled to Argentina, where they stayed for two years. It was there that Chouchkov says he learned of the deaths of his Atom Kor supervisor and two others involved in the Iran deal.

A few months after the couple’s arrival in the United States in 1995, Chouchkov says, he learned of an attack on his mother in Russia by men demanding to know his address. She was hospitalized for several weeks as a result of a concussion.

“The uncontroverted course of conduct shown in the record is consistent only with a pattern of attempted vengeance and retribution for the very fact of Chouchkov’s being a political dissident,” the appeals court ruled.