An analysis of reports by international organisations over more than 20 years has shown that the situation regarding human rights in Tajikistan has severely deteriorated. Mentions of arrests and torture have increased by hundreds of per cent, the rights of journalists have been violated more often, and organisations pay more attention to women’s rights.
Research Methodology
The annual reports of 6 human rights organisations on the English language in Tajikistan from the years 2000-2021 were selected for analysis:
- Human Rights Watch (2000-2003; 2005-2020)
- Amnesty International (2000-2021)
- Freedom House (2000-2021)
- S. Department of State (2000-2021)
- Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (2005, 2007, 2009, 2013, 2015, 2017, 2019, 2020)
- European Union (2014-2021)
At the time of conducting the study, the reports for 2022 had not yet been released by all organisations. The reports of all organisations were sorted by year and amounted to 858 pages. The keywords we compiled based on our preliminary review of the document were extracted and divided into 4 categories – violations, actors, actions, and opposition parties.
When data were collected and sorted, single-root words were immediately merged into one term, e.g. police and policemen in our analysis are presented under one word “police”; journalist, journalists and journalistic are presented under “journalist”; criticise, critical and criticism are presented under “criticize”. Words, such as censor and censorship, woman and women, were processed in the same way. The word female, which refers to a person’s biological sex rather than gender identity, was also combined with women in our case.
The subheadings that contained the keywords were also taken into account in the analysis.
We did not find synonyms for “journalist” and “press” in the reports. When analysing the word “press”, all its meanings related to the work of the media were taken into account. However, its homonym “press” (in the sense of putting “pressure”) was not taken into account. Also, all references to the word “media” were added to the synonym “press”.
“Self-censorship” also arises out of fear of administrative or criminal prosecution. This indicator is important for analysing the state of the press in Tajikistan and we have therefore separated it from state censorship, which is prohibited under the Law on Periodical Press and Other Mass Media.
We were unable to find an equal number of reports for all organisations. Human Rights Watch’s 2014 global report, Human Rights and Armed Conflict lacks information on Tajikistan. UN Special Rapporteurs have published their observations on specific issues, only in 2005, 2007, 2009, 2015, 2017, 2019, 2020 and twice in 2013. And the EU Annual Reports on Human Rights and Democracy, which mentioned Tajikistan, have been published since 2014. This may explain the occasional outbursts in the frequency of mention of certain words. Such cases are explained separately in the article.
We selected several words that are associated with human rights, their violation, and the branches of power and tracked the frequency with which they appear in the reports of international organisations. In this way, we intend to find out which topics international human rights defenders focus on and which years have seen a peak in the frequency of use of certain terms (keywords). Below is a list of them divided into categories.
Violations
torture, violence, violence, victim, corruption, abuse, discrimination, harassment, violation, threat, rape, extort, self-censorship, censorship, suppress.
Actors
government, women, girls, police, prosecutor, judge, journalist, prisoner, detainee, association, press, radio, television, newspaper, minority.
Actions
arrest, restrict, prohibit, criticize, detain, investigation, prosecute, investigate, imprisonment, punish, boycott, confront, destabilize.
Opposition parties
The selection was also conducted to identify the frequency of references to opposition parties: the same political organisation was mentioned with various names. Often the full name of a party was followed immediately by its acronym in the same sentence. In order to achieve greater objectivity, we decided to clear the text of duplicates. For example, if “United Tajik Opposition” was immediately followed by its acronym (UTO) in parentheses, we counted it as one reference.
The Islamic Renaissance Party, recognized as a terrorist in Tajikistan, was mentioned in the studied texts in the following variations: Islamic Renaissance Party, Islamic Revival Party, IRP, Islamic Renaissance Party of Tajikistan, and IRPT.
The term United Tajik Opposition had no other names, only its acronym, UTO, was cited.
The Islamic Liberation Party (banned in Tajikistan) was mentioned in three variations – Hizb ut-Tahrir, HT, and Party of Liberation.
The Social Democratic Party of Tajikistan has been referred to as the Social Democratic Party, SDP and SDPT.
Democratic Party of Tajikistan – Democratic Party, DP, Tajik Democratic Party, and TDP
Opposition organisations other than the Group of 24 and the Salafia movement (also banned in Tajikistan) were never mentioned in the reports.
Author Note
Some events that took place several years ago were often repeated in the reports as background information. Events from the previous year naturally appeared in the following year’s reports. Scholars who are going to conduct in-depth contextual research on violations of specific rights and freedoms can look at outbreaks of the frequencies in a particular year, but analyse news reports and historical data from the previous year. For example, observed high frequencies of references to violations of journalists’ rights in 2021 mean that they took place in 2020.
In 2021, reported human rights violations in Tajikistan dramatically increased compared to 2000
In the 2021 reports, mentions of most of the keywords we selected increased by hundreds of times when compared to the 2000 data. Torture is mentioned 820% more often: while in 2000 the word was used only 5 times, in 2021 it was mentioned 46 times.
It would seem that the increase in references to the terms we have chosen is due to the fact that international organisations have been able to gather more information about Tajikistan thanks to the development of communication technologies, primarily the Internet. However, the percentage of the population with access to the Internet on the contrary has declined in recent years.
Tajikistan's population had the highest Internet penetration in 2012-2013. At that time, about 46% of Tajiks accessed the Internet at least 2-3 times a month.
In 2014, this figure had already fallen to 40.38%.
We also have available indicators from the same international organisations measuring the state of human rights in Tajikistan.
Reporters Without Borders estimates that the press in Tajikistan enjoyed relative freedom until the end of the 00s and that 2021 and 2022 were the worst years for Tajik journalism. At the same time, it can be seen that with the increasing accessibility of the internet to the population in 2012-2013, the situation of the media has improved drastically.
Freedom House scores from 2000 to 2022 are even more critical - according to the organisation, Tajikistan has never been a free country and political rights have always been restricted. However, from 2020 onwards, the organisation argues that all political rights have been taken away from citizens completely.
Civil liberties have improved slightly since 2000, but Freedom House raised Tajikistan's score in 2021 to just 8 out of 60, which, according to the organisation's methodology, indicates that Tajikistan remains not free.
In this and the previous chart, it is clear that the correlation between the situation of civil liberties and political rights and access to the Internet is minimal.
There is also the question of the impact of the irregularity of publications and the revision of reporting formats by human rights organisations on the frequency of the highlighted keywords.
Indeed, research on all organisations has not been published annually and Freedom House has radically changed the format of its human rights reports since 2017. These documents have become shorter, but the number of keyword mentions in the aggregate of all organisations has only increased. The anomalous fluctuations of individual words in this study are only observed during the publication of the reports of the Special Rapporteurs of the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. The UN did not issue any reports in 2021, so it can be concluded that the formats and frequency of publication of the reports did not affect the findings of the study.
It can therefore be concluded that the data from the reports indicate a deterioration in the human rights situation in Tajikistan compared to the noughties.
In the spotlight: arrests, torture and women's rights
Analysis of the data showed that torture was mentioned more than 830 times in reports by international organisations and violence more than 730 times. Victims and corruption in Tajikistan were mentioned more than 520 times. Pressure, censorship and extortion were mentioned least of all. It is notable that self-censorship is more common than censorship, and discrimination and ill-treatment are pervasive problems.
In two years there were two anomalously high frequencies of mentioning the word "torture": in 2013 - 203 times, and in 2015 - 141 times. The reason behind it is that during these periods the UN Special Rapporteurs published reports on the situation of torture in Tajikistan, and if we remove these 2 years from the analysis, it turns out that in 19 years torture was mentioned 492 times, which is also a high rate.
In the category of "violations" there is another outbreak of mentions of the word "victim" and "violence" in 2009 and 2013. In 2009, the special report on violence against women came out, and "violence" was mentioned 135 times, the same year "victim" was mentioned 62 times. In 2013, with the release of the report on torture, there was also an increase in mentions of "violence" (61 times) and "victim" (57 times). No other anomalies were observed in this category.
Within 21 years, more attention has been paid to the rights of women and girls. In 2000, "women" was mentioned 45 times, while girls were mentioned only once. In 2021, women were mentioned 72 times and girls 7 times.
The term "woman" was mentioned in the reports by times more than other "actors". Anomaly came into the picture at the year of 2009, when the word was used 259 times. However, even excluding that year from the report, the gap in the frequency of references is still high. This suggests that international organisations are paying close attention to women's rights, which means that the rights of the female population of Tajikistan may have been violated year after year. However, the rights of the girls were written 9 times fewer.
An increase in mentions is also observed for the other keywords in the "actors" category, except for newspapers and television. At the same time, 250% more was written about journalists in 2021 and 111% more about press and media (including social networks) than in 2000.
If we look at the different types of media separately, we find that since 2010 the influence of independent newspapers and TV channels started to decline. The term 'radio' was used more frequently due to new and ongoing government restrictions on access to the website and social pages of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, although some of the restrictions have been eased. Journalists from Ozodi have also been denied accreditation, which has also affected human rights organisations' reporting. Note that human rights activists have also written about violations of journalists' rights by a number of print media outlets, including Asia-Plus, Nigoh, Farazh, Ozodagon and others.
It should be noted that the words "police" and "prosecutor" correlate with the word "torture" and the number of "detainees" and "prisoners" in the reports of international organisations appears to be about the same.
The least frequently written term is "minorities". In 21 years this word was mentioned only 149 times. Yet a recent study by CABAR.asia found that minorities are underrepresented in the political and public life of the country.
The role of the government in the state of human rights in Tajikistan cannot be underestimated. The "government" was mentioned at least 154 times and on average more than 217 times per year during the study period.
Journalists on state media resources often give credit to the role of the current leadership in achieving stability, peace and tranquillity. Analysis shows that the word destabilisation itself rarely appears in reports - only nine times. But the number of detentions, arrests, prosecutions, imprisonments and other acts restricting human freedom has increased sharply.
There are over 700 mentions of restrictive measures and arrests in the reports. The travel restrictions imposed by the Government of Tajikistan during the COVID-19 pandemic did not cause significant changes in the frequency of mentions in 2019-2021. No abnormal changes were detected in the "action" category either.
Bans on opposition parties
The United Tajik Opposition stopped fighting the government back in 1997, but international organisations were most often reminded of it in the early 2000s.
The gradual banning of other parties and radical associations has reduced the number of their mentions to a minimum. Conversely, the declaration of the Islamic Renaissance Party of Tajikistan as a terrorist organisation in 2015 led to an increase in mentions of this organisation in the reports we studied.
Political scientist Khursand Khurramov writes that when the Islamists and democrats united, "the Islamic Renaissance Party (banned in Tajikistan) played a key role because it had more mass support due to its Islamic ideology and resource capabilities, including through external funding".
According to experts, the Social Democratic Party of Tajikistan currently remains the only officially registered real opposition party in Tajikistan. However, the SDPT is not as active and massive as the IRPT and mainly recalls itself through social media and virtual space. And in the absence of an alternative but equally powerful opposition, international organisations are forced to refer to political structures not officially operating in the country in their reports.
Conclusions
The human rights climate in Tajikistan has indeed deteriorated over the past 21 years (2000 - 2021). The results of the keyword analysis correlate with the numerical indicators of human rights organisations on the situation of civil and political freedoms in the country.
According to the study, corruption in Tajikistan has multiplied, arrests have increased and restrictive measures have been tightened. Journalists' rights are increasingly being violated and self-censorship prevents journalists from publishing critical materials.
Power structures are increasingly mentioned as actors, which correlates with the frequency of mentions of torture. The government is mentioned many times more than all opposition parties combined.
The situation of women's rights has not improved despite attempts by the authorities to improve their status in public and political life. International organisations do not often write about minorities, but this does not mean that the state has done everything possible to integrate them into the political life of the country.