APRIL 21 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – The UN Human Rights Council urged Kyrgyzstan authorities to release Azimzhan Askarov, a political activist arrested in 2010. In July 2015, the US government described Mr Askarov as a political prisoner and awarded him a special human rights award. This sparked an angry reaction from the Kyrgyz government and damaged Kyrgyzstan-US relations.
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(News report from Issue No. 277, published on April 22 2016)
APRIL 22 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – International pressure against human rights abuses sometimes works. In a surprise move, Azerbaijan’s authorities allowed Leyla and Arif Yunus, two recently-freed human rights activists, to leave the country. Worsening health had been the authorities’ reason to free the Yunuses at the end of last year. But they still faced a suspended sentence and were banned from leaving the country.
Now, effectively, Azerbaijan’s government is giving them a chance to seek both medical treatment and asylum in Europe.
This has to be cheered. It showed that EU and US pressure can work. It also gave Azerbaijan a way out of a difficult stand-off over its clampdown on opposition activists and human rights workers.
Last month, Azerbaijan also released a handful of activists in an amnesty.
But there is still some way to go. Other journalists and opposition activists are still in Azerbaijani prisons.
The public pressure on Azerbaijan and the behind-the-scenes dialogue that no doubt helped the Yunuses to the Netherlands must be maintained.
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(Editorial from Issue No. 277, published on April 22 2016)
APRIL 11 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – The New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) criticised the European Union for pressing ahead with its negotiations to extend a trade deal with Turkmenistan despite no tangible progress in the country’s human rights record. “The Turkmen government has done almost nothing to meet the human rights benchmarks,” said Rachel Denber, deputy Central Asia director at HRW.
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(News report from Issue No. 276, published on April 15 2016)
APRIL 12 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – A Kyrgyz parliamentary committee approved a weaker version of the so-called foreign agents bill than they had originally devised, eurasianet.org reported, appearing to give way to strong opposition to the new laws which Western human rights activists said had been inspired by a similar law in Russia. The paperwork burden and the hostile labelling of groups linked to foreign governments has been reduced compared to the previous version.
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(News report from Issue No. 276, published on April 15 2016)
APRIL 8 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – Setykazy Matayev, a senior figure in Kazakhstan’s media scene and the former head of President Nursultan Nazarbayev’s press office, was sent to hospital suffering from high blood pressure. He was arrested last month and charged with corruption. He is the the most high-profile journalist to be arrested during a crackdown by the authorities on media over the past few months. Analysts have said the crackdown could be linked to a drop in the economy.
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(News report from Issue No. 276, published on April 15 2016)
APRIL 11 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – Georgia’s Constitutional Court ruled that a 2014 surveillance bill is unconstitutional, rolling back on a controversial piece of legislation. The law allowed the security services to have unrestricted access to telecom operators’ networks to monitor communications. President Giorgi Margvelashvili had vetoed the bill in November 2014, but the Parliament overrode the veto and adopted the legislation.
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(News report from Issue No. 276, published on April 15 2016)
APRIL 1 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – A court in Azerbaijan found five men guilty of beating to death a journalist in August, sentencing them to prison.
The case triggered public debates in Azerbaijan where the authorities have appeared to hold critical journalists in contempt with their own clampdown on the media over the past few years.
The five men received sentences of between 9 and 13 years for knocking Rasim Aliyev to the floor and beating him in broad daylight in Baku. He later died in hospital from his injuries.
They were relatives and friends of Cavid Huseynov, an Azerbaijani international football player. Aliyev had criticised Mr Huseynov as “immoral and ill-bred” in a Facebook post for goading supporters of Apollon, a Cypriot team, at a football match by waving a Turkish flag.
After the verdict, Aliyev’s father said: “All of them are criminals and they killed my son on purpose. They planned the attack before meeting my son and they killed him.”
Mr Huseynov faces a trial for not reporting the crime. He has not been linked directly with the beating.
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(News report from Issue No. 275, published on April 8 2016)
APRIL 3 2016, DUSHANBE (The Conway Bulletin) — The death of a 27- year-old man after he had been questioned by Tajik police has sparked a row over police brutality in Tajikistan.
Bunyod Mirzoyev was found hanged after three days of police questioning over his apparent links to the Islamic extremist group IS. His family and friends said that police tortured him to try to extract a confession and had then killed him to try and hide the evidence.
The accusation triggered a forthright response from the police who issued a statement saying that they were on the receiving end of slander and that opponents of the authorities were trying to use the death of Mirzoyev to discredit the police.
Instead, the Tajik police said Mirzoyev had hanged himself from a tree when he returned home after being questioned.
“The suicide of B. Mirzoyev is currently under investigation by the prosecution,” the police said.
Still, human rights groups have long complained about police brutality in Tajikistan.
In 2012, Amnesty International released a report about the Tajik police’s use of torture to extract confessions.
“The torture methods used by the security forces are shocking: involving electric shocks, boiling water, suffocation, beatings, burning with cigarettes, rape and threats of rape – the only escape is to sign a confession or sometimes to pay a bribe ,” it said.
And it’s not difficult to find people who have had first hand experience of it.
A 32-year-old worker, said that the police beat people even if they have not done anything. “They can beat you up so hard that you will confess that you killed Lenin,” he said.
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(News report from Issue No. 275, published on April 8 2016)
MARCH 30 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – A court of appeal in Kazakhstan suspended prison sentences handed out to two Kazakh activists in January. Yermek Narymbayev and Serikzhan Mambetalin, imprisoned for posting messages on Facebook that the authorities said spread racial hatred, were released from prison and put under house arrest. Human rights activists saw this as a conciliatory move towards the EU ahead of President Nursultan Nazarbayev’s visit to Brussels.
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(News report from Issue No. 274, published on April 1 2016)
MARCH 28 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – A court in Azerbaijan converted a seven-year prison sentence into a five-year conditional one for human rights lawyer Intigam Aliyev, allowing his immediate release. Mr Aliyev had already spent two years in prison. His release follows the release of 14 political prisoners earlier this month. The West has criticised Azerbaijan for its crack- down on free speech.
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(News report from Issue No. 274, published on April 1 2016)