Al-Khalidi v. Bulgaria, Application No. 26364/24, communicated by the Court in April 2025 and currently pending before Strasbourg.
Pending. Communicated to the respondent Government. Strongest factual ground: the January 2024 release order that was not executed.
The application is registered before the European Court of Human Rights under No. 26364/24. The HUDOC page is the main official reference and remains the canonical source for procedural updates.
The case concerns prolonged administrative immigration detention in Bulgaria, the risk of refoulement to Saudi Arabia, and the human rights consequences of continuing detention while asylum-related proceedings remained unresolved before the Bulgarian courts.
Counsel: Hristo Vasilev (Vasilev, Dobrinov & Associates) and Mr. Koynov, with international support from MENA Rights Group and other partners.
No. 26364/24, against Bulgaria.
April 2025. The Court invited the respondent Government to submit observations.
October 2021, at Busmantsi detention centre, Sofia. Later transferred to Lyubimets.
A Bulgarian court ordered release on 18 January 2024. That order was never executed; the applicant remained in detention.
Three Supreme Administrative Court rulings (2023–2025) annulled lower-court refusals of asylum. The lower court repeated the same errors after each annulment.
The official Court page for the application, including procedural status and communicated questions.
Detailed timeline of Bulgarian court decisions, release orders, and the procedural trajectory leading to Strasbourg.
The application raises questions that touch the architecture of EU asylum law itself: how administrative detention is used when intelligence agencies invoke national security without disclosing the file even to defence counsel; what procedural safeguards apply in such cases; and how Bulgaria honours non-refoulement obligations in proceedings where lower courts are repeatedly overturned and release orders go unexecuted.
A Strasbourg ruling on these questions would set a benchmark for similar cases of human rights defenders in EU detention systems.
Read the full legal chronology for the Bulgarian-court trajectory that led to Strasbourg.
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