On 2 and 3 December, 2021, the 28th session of the Ministerial Council of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) was held in Stockholm, Sweden. The Turkmen delegation also attended the event.
Prior to the meeting the Parallel OSCE Civil Society Conference was organized by the Civic Solidarity Platform. Based on the outcomes of the meeting an appeal to OSCE participating States regarding the human rights situation in Turkmenistan was adopted.
The appeal signed by over 50 non-governmental organizations states that the year 2022 marks the 20th anniversary of the beginning of mass repression in Turkmenistan, which targeted not only individual critics of the regime but also their surroundings relatives, colleagues and acquaintances.
“Arbitrary mass arrests, torture, physical and psychological pressure on relatives of suspects and even accidental witnesses, the use of special pharmacological drugs during interrogation, swift and closed trials based on trumped-up charges, and convictions to long sentences or even to life, in gross violation of existing legislation, affected a large number of people”, – the appeal states.
In response to the wave of mass repression, the OSCE participating states invoked the Moscow Mechanism with respect to Turkmenistan.A report issued by Professor Emmanuel Decaux runs: “The contrast between the law as it is presented and the reality marked by terror and fright is mindboggling. […] Turkmenistan cannot constitute a “black hole” within the OSCE, a human rights desert.”
The new government represented by President Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov did not stop the practice of disappearing people in prisons. The Prove They Are Alive! campaign has documented 162 cases of disappearances in Turkmenistan’s prisons since 2002.
“Throughout all these years, the government has denied families and the outside world any information about the disappeared. The detainees have been denied visitors and any correspondence, phone calls or other contact with families, lawyers, doctors, etc.” the human rights defenders say.
11 persons from the list of the disappeared whose terms have already expired have not been released yet. Terms of another dozen people will expire in 2022.
Turkmenistan continues to ignore relevant decisions by inter-governmental bodies and refuses to disclose any information about the vast majority of the cases from the list of the disappeared to their relatives and the international community.
There are serious reasons to believe that the Turkmen authorities are preparing new waves of repression. In particular, they are taking active steps to organise the deportation of exiled Turkmen civic activists from a number of countries, primarily from Turkey and Russia.
The appeal says that the scale of continued repression in Turkmenistan requires an adequate reaction and calls on the OSCE participating States to invoke the OSCE human dimension mechanisms with respect to Turkmenistan, namely the Vienna and the Moscow mechanisms.
The full version of the report is available here.The post Over 50 non-governmental organizations call on the OSCE to launch the Moscow mechanism with respect to Turkmenistan first appeared on Chronicles of Turkmenistan.