The Red Cross has paid a rare visit to a Turkmen prison. A delegation “acquainted itself” with one of the Interior Ministry’s detention centers last week, the International Committee of the Red Cross said in an April 10 statement. The ICRC mission, which included a doctor, also visited the site of a prison under construction.
The statement offered few details, but Reuters reported that this is the first time Ashgabat has allowed a Red Cross delegation into a prison since Turkmenistan’s independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. Last July, a team from the Red Cross visited a prison medical facility.
"These visits are a stage in Turkmenistan's many-sided cooperation with the ICRC," the statement said.
The Associated Press said the visit “appears to represent a breakthrough” in the reclusive and authoritarian country. “Turkmenistan’s authoritarian government has long been criticized for refusing international access to inmates in detention and prison.”
Foreign-based Turkmen rights activists say the country’s jails are overcrowded and that disease is rife. Authorities are believed to routinely imprison dissidents.
A 2010 report by foreign-based Turkmenistan’s Independent Lawyers Association and the Turkmen Initiative for Human Rights estimated that there were around 8,100 inmates in the countries at the time. The exact number fluctuates considerably, however, due to periodic widespread amnesties and no official figures are made available
