Monitoring Human Rights in Central Asia

In Central Asia, an IWPR project to provide human rights training to journalists across Kazakstan and Kyrgyzstan, organised a series of training seminars in both countries as part of the Central Asia Human Rights Reporting Project aimed at building bridges between regional media and the human rights community.

The events took place in the southern Kyrgyz city of Jalalabad, the capital Bishkek and in the Kazak city of Almaty, and focused on the monitoring of human rights in state institutions such as prisons, as well as introducing modern concepts of human rights and key conventions.

The problematic issue of NGOs in Turkmenistan was also highlighted. IWPR reported that nothing had changed for Turkmen civil society groups in more than two years since incoming Turkmen president Gurbanguly Berdymuhammedov promised to relax rigid restrictions.

IWPR’s report opened up the debate on how unregistered Turkmen NGOs find it hard to be recognised by the international donor community and therefore miss out on funding, said Vyacheslav Mamedov, head of the émigré Civic Democratic Union of Turkmenistan.

“What’s important [is that the IWPR] article reports about various civil society groups facing such problems and covers different parts of Turkmenistan,” he said.

“It is of a great interest not only for a foreign reader but also for the active part of Turkmen society that does not have the possibility to get reliable information about NGOs experiencing registration problems.”