Escaped from Russia 20 years ago, now she is a national threat to Hungary

Under ideal circumstances, Iraida Choubina, or as her documents have stated for years now, Gáborné Nagy, should have spent her 59th birthday surrounded by her loving family. Though a Russian national, she has been living in Hungary since the beginning of the 2000s. Now she is worried about whether she can stay in Hungary with her loved ones or be forced to leave the country she has called home for almost 20 years.

The Immigration and Asylum Office has deprived her of her refugee status back in November, of the document she acquired in 2007. Moreover, she was proclaimed a subject of deportation from Hungary. Now she fears she will really be kicked out of the country.

She and her family are trying everything so that the decision would be reconsidered and she would not have to return to the country she fears. She told 444.hu what made her, as a young mother, flee Russia and the KGB and seek refuge in Hungary, and what actions led to her being declared a threat to national security.

Iraida Choubina was born into a Jewish family in 1962. She got married at an early age, and she and her husband started a successful business of organising educational trips to America for kids and youngsters. Their programmes were always organised by her husband, so he travelled quite a lot to the USA. Iraida claims this was the reason the successor of the KGB,

the Federal Security Service, reached out to her husband in 1997 to make him provide information from the American circles he was in contact with.

When he rejected the attempt to recruit him, the organisation started a legal procedure for fraud, based on false and artificially created accusations. When he escaped the procedure, the security service tried to look for him through his wife.

They told her she could not go on with her job if she did not make her husband go back to Russia. Instead, Iriada travelled abroad with a valid passport, with her 3 kids, pregnant with her 5th child, as her oldest son was already studying in the United States. She chose Hungary as she could enter the country without a visa in 1998. Apart from loving the country, it reminded her of her home. However, personnel from the Federal Security Service appeared quite fast in Budapest to find out her husband’s whereabouts.

With the help of a local Jewish community, she managed to obtain a visa to travel to the USA. When her visa expired, however, she decided to go back to Russia with her two youngest children, thinking that maybe enough time had passed since she left. She was wrong as,

in January 2000, she was stopped by the police on the street to check her documents, then she was arrested and taken into custody. Just as her husband, she was also accused of fraud

committed in a Jewish cultural centre she used to work for. She claims all the accusations were untrue, simply an excuse to keep her locked up for the total time of the investigation, which lasted 6 entire months. In the end, she was released as allegations proved to be false.

She took her two kids who had been taken care of by their grandmother and travelled back to Hungary, where she applied for asylum. In order to evaluate her situation and judge her case, she had to talk about what happened to her in prison in Russia and to prove that she was imprisoned without any real reason. It took her almost 4 years. It was at her third attempt to officially seek asylum when at her hearing

she finally talked about all the suffering, torture, and sexual abuse she had to endure. 

The psychiatric evaluation identified her as suffering from PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder), proposed her medication and therapy.

The first time she filed her application for asylum, it was rejected by the Immigration Office saying that there was no proof Russia was chasing her, violating the Geneva Convention. Experts on external affairs and refugee matters said that it was highly unlikely from the Russian authorities to arrest her solely because her husband was wanted, surely it was because she was an accomplice in his businesses. And whether it was legal or not that she was held imprisoned for 6 months was not for the Hungarian authorities to decide.

She claims she even had to withhold a request due to the Security Service still pressuring her. Meanwhile, she tried in Austria and Switzerland as well, but she was always redirected to Hungary.