Turkmen Activists to Raise Press Freedom Issues at OSCE Event

Human rights defenders from Turkmenistan plan to use an OSCE meeting to raise key concerns about the situation in the country, although the Central Asian state’s government will be unhappy to see them there.

The annual OSCE meeting reviewing the “human dimension” of the grouping’s work opens in Warsaw on September 26, and this year will focus on the state of media freedom across the region.

"We will have something to say at the conference about freedom of movement and about media freedom," Annadurdy Hadjiev, a Turkmen dissident based in Bulgaria, said.

Turkmenistan has no independent media of any kind., state media are heavily censored, and journalists who stray from the official line can face serious trouble.

At OSCE human dimension meetings, non-government actors as well as official representatives from member states are invited to make their case. At last year’s event, the Turkmen authorities did their best to get critics barred from attending. (See: Turkmenistan Tries to Bar Rights Activists From OSCE Event http://iwpr.net/report-newaas/turkmenistan-tries-bar-rights-activists-osce-event)

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