Punishing Juvenile Offenders in Turkmenistan

Despite talk of improving juvenile justice in Turkmenistan, the law and its implementation remain harshly punitive, activists say.

A workshop on international standards for juvenile justice and methods of working with young offenders and their families took place in the Turkmen capital Ashgabat on August 21, following a similar event in the city of Mary a few days earlier.

The workshops, aimed at public servants, were organised by the United Nations children’s fund UNICEF and the Turkmen National Institute for Democracy and Human Rights. Legal experts from the UK attended.

Turkmenistan has ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, and passed a domestic law guaranteeing child rights in 2002. It has also approved a five-year plan with UNICEF to cooperate on child health and welfare.

Commentators say good laws mean nothing if they are not applied in practice.

“It would be possible to set up a separate judicial system for adolescents,” said a judge in Ashgabat district court. “But what difference would it make? There are a series of child protection provisions in the constitution that are never applied in practice.”

The judge cited the legal guarantee that children enjoy freedom of expression and confession. “Is that possible in Turkmenistan, where even adults are not allowed this?” he asked.

Another district court judge in the capital argued that a separate judicial system for young people would be inappropriate for Turkmenistan given its culture and traditions.

“In Turkmen families, it is the rule that children obey their father,” he said. “We’re used to raising our voice at them and punishing them. A [separate] juvenile system would allow children to call the police against their parents.”

Human rights activists disagree strongly with such views, saying the introduction of better standards of juvenile justice might make the courts deal with young offenders more fairly.

A rights activist from Ashgabat recalled cases from the Nineties when courts sentenced a number of minors to three years for stealing apples, four years for stealing brooms, and seven years for a boy who stole food from a farm after escaping from a foster home where he had been chained up.

Tajigul Begmedova, head of the Turkmen Helsinki Fund, a rights group based in Bulgaria, fears the judicial system is not yet ready for reforms.

“The judicial system is not transparent and works according to the old ways,” Begmedova said. “Judges deal with juvenile offenders not on the basis of corrective action, but punishment.”

This article was produced as part of IWPR’s News Briefing Central Asia output, funded by the National Endowment for Democracy.