Disappeared in Turkmenistan’s Prisons: Are They Still Alive?

At the time of this hearing - attended by Janice Helwig, policy advisor with the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe; Rachel Denber, Deputy Director of Human Rights Watch’s Europe and Central Asia Division; Catherine Fitzpatrick, Independent Expert on Eurasia; Peter Zalmayev, Director of the Eurasia Democracy Initiative; Kate Watters, Executive Director of Crude Accountability; and Boris Shikhmuradov, editor at Gundogar.org – ten years had passed when ten member states of the OSCE had invoked the Moscow Mechanism against Turkmenistan out of concern over hundreds of arrests in the wake of an alleged failed coup attempt. Many of these individuals had remained unaccounted for because the government of Turkmenistan was involved in disappearing prisoners and then denying that they had done so.

Since the Moscow Mechanism was invoked, the U.S. had also raised this issue every year at the OSCE Human Dimension Implementation Meeting in Warsaw in a special statement. This practice had underscored the repression of the Turkmen government that changed very little after President Niyazov died in 2006.