On 20 and 26 December 2024, Tbilisi City Court held hearings to decide whether Georgia should extradite Adina Stoian and her husband Mihai arrested in August 2024 on the Turkish-Georgian border on the basis of an Interpol arrest warrant issued on France’s request.
A few days after mid-December, I happened to be in Tbilisi for The European Times to cover the unstable political situation and the demonstrations in the country following the contested results of the parliamentary elections and the subsequent election of a new contested pro-Kremlin president by the new parliament. On this occasion, I published two articles titled “GEORGIA: Election of an ex-footballer as the new president booed by demonstrators” and “GEORGIA: Police violence in Tbilisi while President Zurabishvili calls for quick EU actions”. I also used the opportunity of being in Tbilisi to meet state and non-state actors as well as lawyers involved in the case of the Stoians and to collect some unpublished information about the couple. A member of their family was also in Tbilisi.
At the end of the second hearing taking place after my departure from Georgia, the court found that a third hearing was necessary to try to solve a crucial issue: the interpretation of the debates and the translation of printed or written court documents in Romanian, as strongly required by Adina and Mihai Stoian and their lawyers instead of the English language imposed until then by the judicial authorities.
The court considered that Mihai and Adina Stoian were sufficiently fluent in English due to their international activities but their counter-argument was that the legal and judicial language used during the proceedings and interpreted in English was foreign to them and was putting them at risk of failing to understand the implications of what they might have to accept and to sign.
The double translation arrof complex issues first by the interpreter Georgian-English and second by themselves in their own language (Romanian) was de facto opening the door to inaccuracies and misunderstandings at both levels and could lead to a miscarriage of justice they would be the victims of, they argued.
The context of the arrest of Adina and Mihai Stoian
On 28 November 2023, a SWAT team of around 175 policemen wearing black masks, helmets, and bullet proof vests, simultaneously descended at 6am on eight separate houses and apartments in and around Paris but also in Nice where Romanian yoga practitioners had decided to go into spiritual retreat. The police forces were then brandishing semi-automatic rifles, shouting, making very loud noises, crashing doors and putting everything upside down.
Most of those Romanian yoga practitioners who were there had chosen to combine the pleasant with the useful in France: yoga and meditation in villas or apartments kindly and freely put at their disposal by their owners or tenants who were also mainly yoga practitioners of Romanian origin and at the same time to enjoy picturesque natural or other environments.
They were IT experts, engineers, designers, artists, medical doctors, psychologists, teachers, university and high school students, and so on.
Around 50 yoga practitioners of all ages were taken to police stations for interrogation, most of them being kept in custody for two days and sometimes more. In November 2024, I published in The European Times an article about the case titled “Police raids on Romanian yoga centers in France, one year later”.
The 28 November 2023 raids were not an operation against a terrorist or armed group or a drug cartel. They were raids targeting eight private places mainly used by peaceful Romanian yoga practitioners but the police suspected these places to be used under cover for illegal activities: trafficking in human beings, sexual exploitation and forcible confinement.This was the official charge against Gregorian Bivolaru and some others who were put in pretrial detention in France in the aftermath of the raids.
The arrest warrant against the Stoians channeled from Paris to Tbilisi through Interpol included the same charges although they were not in France at the time of the police raids or before, had never had any yoga activity in France and no yoga practitioner had filed a complaint against them. In the French media, they were repeatedly painted as criminals, without any evidence that journalists could have gathered by themselves, but who is Adina Stoian?
Family and social background of Adina Stoian
Adina Stoian was born on 12 June 1968 in Sibiu (Romania).
She grew up in Bucharest under the Communist rule of Ceaucescu but was baptized in the Orthodox Church.
Her mother was an accountant at the Ministry of Transport. Her father studied at the Bucharest Polytechnic University and made a military career.
In her studies, Adina followed in her father’s footsteps. In 1991 she graduated from the Polytechnic University with a degree in Transport Engineering. Afterwards, she worked for about two years in the Computer Centre of the Ministry of Transport in Romania before dedicating herself exclusively to spirituality, teaching yoga and trantra classes. She has a sister, Corina, who graduated in mathematics from the Bucharest University. Corina taught mathematics for some time and later on she started working in other fields while teaching yoga in her free time for the last ten years.
In 1990 Adina started attending classes and other events on spirituality and yoga, including lectures given by Gregorian Bivolaru, the founder and spiritual master of MISA (Movement for Spiritual Integration into the Absolute). She was impressed by his teachings.
For over 30 years, she was a yoga practitioner and also a teacher. She shared her knowledge about yoga and personal development through articles and books, courses, workshops, seminars, conferences and camps, both in Romania and elsewhere in Europe, as well as in Asia and South America.
Adina and Mihai Stoian got married in a Romanian Orthodox Church in 2001 and moved to Denmark a year later. As yoga teachers, they worked for the Danish Yoga Natha Centre.
They both co-authored yoga and personal development programs based on the teachings of the traditional tantra yoga. The course is currently taught in many countries in the schools affiliated with Atman, the International Federation for Yoga and Meditation, officially registered in 2004 in the UK. Noteworthy is that Adina Stoian has never been part of the board of the Atman Federation. They also wrote together several books about the Mahavidya, a group of ten Hindu goddesses.
Adina Stoian also gave lectures on topics such as hormones, pre-menstrual syndrom, esoteric astrology, specifically for women. She is opposed to her extradition to France, saying she was not involved in any yoga activity there and in any illegal activity as mentioned in the Interpol arrest warrant, had nothing to do with the massive police raids on yoga centers on 28 November 2023 which led to several arrests and pretrial detention cases, and no yoga practitioner had filed a complaint against her or her husband.
We acknowledge The European Times for the information.
