Marko Štambuk arrived at Belgrade district prison on a Monday morning in late January, only to be told his client was no longer inside. “Immediately I knew something had happened,” he said.
Štambuk, a lawyer, had spent the previous Friday frantically obtaining an injunction from the European court of human rights (ECHR) demanding Serbian authorities halt the extradition of his client, Ahmed Jaafar Mohamed Ali, a Bahraini dissident. This banned the Serbian authorities from extraditing Ali until late February, and warned them that doing so would constitute a rare breach of the European convention on human rights.
