The recent publication of a law in Turkmenistan that decriminalizes the activity of unregistered non-governmental organizations may offer hope for the country's embattled civil society activists. Even so, those in the nascent NGO sector generally view the new law with skepticism.
On Monday, November 25, 2002, the president of Turkmenistan, Saparmurat Niyazov, announced on evening television that assailants had fired on his motorcade that morning in an attempt to overthrow him.
The U.S. Agency for International Development's recently unveiled strategy for assistance to Central Asia (2001-2005) is a sober and cautious plan, apparently born of disappointment in regional governments' records on democratic and economic reform.
Armenia and Azerbaijan together have taken a sudden leap forward in the last few weeks toward full institutional integration into Europe. Yet their human rights record will continue to set them apart from their fellow "Europeans" for the foreseeable future.
It is fitting that a statue of Lenin, which the Kyrgyz parliament recently saved from removal, stands today to preside over the capital. On June 27, opposition leader Felix Kulov went on trial in a closed military courtroom for simply being Kyrgyzstan's most viable alternative to President Askar Akayev.
Prior to the departure of the UN Mission of Observers in Tajikistan (UNMOT) on May 15, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan hailed the mission, saying it had "achieved its tasks well."
Torture is the western world's dirty little secret. In a new report, the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights (IHF) identified torture and other forms of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment as one of the OSCE region's most wide-spread problems.
After years of engaging in increasingly blatant human rights violations, President Askar Akayev's administration has launched a full-fledged campaign to neutralize political opposition. In the days before and after run-off parliamentary elections March 12, the government arrested, or otherwise stripped of political potential, virtually all of the country's opposition leaders.
One of the human rights that has seen significant improvement since the fall of the Soviet Union is the right to free speech. Today, all but two CIS states --Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan -- have abolished state censorship. (Azerbaijan joined those ranks only last year, as a precondition for accession to the Council of Europe.)
