Police Watchdog Needs Teeth

A special ombudsman for Kyrgyzstan’s Ministry of Internal Affairs will only be effective if the institution is truly independent of government and is given real power to act, NBCentralAsia observers say.



The idea of setting up an ombudsman to monitor the work of the Interior Ministry, which controls the police force, and to protect people’s rights was presented for public debate on May 16. The move was initiated by an OSCE programme for assisting the law-enforcement agencies, with the support of the Soros Foundation in Kyrgyzstan and the Kyrgyz president’s administration.



The new body would not only keep an eye on how the law-enforcement agencies are treating human rights, it would conduct independent investigations alongside official ones.



Human rights activist Ramazan Dyryldaev says the key question is how the new post of ombudsman will be funded. If the institution is paid for out of the government budget, it is unlikely to do much good/



Taalaybek Koshokov, the deputy of the current ombudsman, who deals with general human rights issues, warns that the new police watchdog may find itself with powers only to issue recommendations. “For example, [the police ombudsman] could recommend that the prosecutor general’s office launch criminal proceedings, but the prosecutor it could refuse, saying there are no grounds for doing so. Who would the [ombudsman] then complain to? The president?” asked Koshokov.



He added that the ombudsman’s local representatives across the country should be elected and accountable to parliament rather than local government.



Dyryldaev said everything depends on the powers that are granted to the police ombudsman. At the moment, he said, the general ombudsman and numerous human rights organisations submit annual reports on the situation to the government, but nothing gets done.



Tamerlan Ibraimov, director of the Centre for Political and Legal Studies, sees no sense in creating a new human rights body which will in part duplicate the role of existing institutions. Instead, he would like to see improvements to the existing organisations.



“I think we have to take the path of improving the quality of existing institutions,” Ibraimov said. “There is also a need for fundamental constitutional and judicial reforms to create mechanisms for protecting the rights of citizens. Without these important reforms, the new institution will be just hot air, nothing else.”



(News Briefing Central Asia draws comment and analysis from a broad range of political observers across the region.)