Annual Report 2008: Turkmenistan

Although arrested in 2020 for sharing a photo, journalist Nurgeldi Halykov was convicted on trumped-up fraud charges and sentenced to four years in prison.

The authorities in several Central Asian states have warned news outlets to tone down their coverage of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, or ignore it entirely.

“Turkmenistan has long been a closed country for independent human rights scrutiny. The pattern of persecution of relatives of activists who live abroad shows the lengths to which its government will go to keep the world from knowing the scale of the human rights violations there.”