According to experts, the practice of transnational repressions used by the regional regimes strengthens, improves and legitimises every time. The leader of Belarus opposition, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, delivered a special speech in this regard.
Washington-based international experts discussed online how the authorities in Central Asia persecute, extradite and imprison political undesirables staying outside the region.
Executive Director of IWPR Anthony Borden, opening the event, noticed that Central Asia is one of the global epicenters of transnational repression.
“All Central Asian countries made the Freedom House rankings of leading abusers. Right after China, Uzbekistan, Russia and Tajikistan are found among the top five. The report shows the highest number of cases among Central Asian states originating in Tajikistan. Much of the harshest actions taken by Uzbekistan, meanwhile, appear to have been committed during the Islam Karimov presidency,” Borden said.
The globalization and development of digital technologies play into the hands of repressive regimes in their struggle against oppositionists and activists based abroad, reporters said.
According to the investigators of this issue, international law has proved incapable of countering transnational repressions at the regional level. Autocratic regimes create successfully and develop legal frameworks for unhindered capture and extradition of citizens at the bilateral and regional levels.
Experts suggest that the international community pay more attention to this problem and begin the dialogue regarding this issue at the regional level, raise issues of compliance of this practice with international norms and human rights observance.
The international discussion was held online and involved nearly 70 participants from various countries (mainly, from the United States, Europe and CIS) – researchers, experts, human rights defenders, journalists and activists.
Leading western experts made reports on this subject: Nate Schenkkan, Director of Research Strategy at Freedom House; Edward Lemon, President, the OXUS Society for Central Asian Affairs, and Alexander Cooley, Director, Harriman Institute; Claire Tow Professor of Political Science Barnard College; Columbia University, Central Asian Studies.
The moderator of the event was Adam Hug, Director, the Foreign Policy Centre (London).
Current events show that this problem is relevant not only in Central Asia, but also in Belarus, in the territory of the CIS. IWPR invited the leader of Belarus opposition, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, to deliver a special speech to focus attention on the topic of the day.
Tsikhanouskaya emphasised that the use of transnational repressions by Lukashenko did not result in anything but new sanctions and tightened isolation from the international community.
She reminded of the violation of international norms by the authorities in Minsk, when the military aircrafts forced the passenger aircraft flying from the Athens to Vilnius via the Belarus airspace to land, and a prominent activist and the head of the news service, NEXTA, Roman Protasevich and his girlfriend were arrested.
“By doing so, the regime once again refused to be a part of the civilized world and embraced the role of international terrorists. The crisis in Belarus stopped being the local conflict about the presidential legitimacy and turned into the problem of regional security,” – Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya said during her speech.
The European Union and the United States, Canada have strongly deprecated these measures taken by the authorities of Minsk and prohibited all aircrafts to fly via the territory of Belarus. This example was followed by some countries of Asia and other mainland countries.
Tsikhanouskaya said that the authorities in Belarus are located in the centre of yet another scandal related to the forced attempt to get a Belarusian athlete from Tokyo back home for criticising the sports executives. This case turned into an international scandal and the athlete confessed she feared to get back to her motherland and found provisional asylum in Poland.
Since last summer, Belarus has been having protests after the presidential elections, which are not recognised by the Belarusian opposition. The western countries did not recognise yet another victory of Lukashenko and imposed a range of sanctions on Minsk. “I am sure that the only way out of the Belarusian crisis is through new elections, and the only future for Belarus is a democratic, independent, and prosperous country. […] I hope that the peaceful resistance of Belarusians can inspire people around the globe to value democracy where they have it and fight for it where they lack it,” said Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya at the international IWPR meeting.
Speaking about Central Asia, the said experts discussed in detail and expressed their opinions about the issue of transnational repression from various points.
This issue was discussed in terms of digitisation, globalisation and regionalisation.
One of the agencies that studies the topic of transnational repression is the international human rights organisation, Freedom House. Nate Schenkkan, Director of Research Strategy, enlarged upon factors that create conditions for transnational repressions.
When studying and monitoring this issue, Freedom House considers not only opposition activists, leaders and other public persons, but also regular citizens as victims of repression. They have to leave their motherland for various reasons.
“Central Asia is very fruitful and important region to understand transnational repression,” representative of the Freedom House emphasised.
Schenkkan drew attention to the ambiguity of online technologies use. On the one hand, they allow activists staying abroad to keep in touch with their relatives and teammates, share their opinions and present various publications via social media. On the other hand, intelligence services in CA countries use all these media to track down people they want, their contacts, identify their location, monitor their movements and detain and get them back to the country when the time comes.
The same is true about travelling. Compared to the 90s and early 2000s, Central Asians now became more mobile, they often travel outside the country and the world. However, the practice shows that the departure from the threatening country does not mean that the threat is gone. A person is at risk of being detained and deported all the way until they reach a safe destination point both in terms of physical distance and legal norms.
Speaking about legal norms, Nate Schenkkan said about the geopolitical peculiarity of this issue. According to him, although the international law system relied upon by the western countries is still functioning, it has many problems in terms of transnational repression and shows its vulnerability to repressive regimes. The authorities of Central Asian countries use the media for their purposes, the expert said.
Another organization that is monitoring and researching transnational repression issues is the OXUS Society for Central Asian Affairs. Its President Edward Lemon told about the database project launched in 2015 together with the UHRP.
During the project, its specialists found 248 cases related to detention, extradition and arrest of political undesirables from the moment of sovereignty of CA states.
According to the database, Uzbekistan used this practice most often – 129 cases, including 35 cases of extradition and 78 cases of detention were found in 1991 to 2019. According to Lemon, the practice was frequently used after the Andizhan events in 2005, when the authorities brought down fire on protesters at the central square of Andizhan, and hundreds of citizens fled to neighbouring Kyrgyzstan. Most of the refugees returned back, some managed to flee to third countries.
Then follows Tajikistan. Expert found 54 cases until 2019. According to Lemon, Tajikistan misuses the INTERPOL tools to find and extradite the citizens it wants, although the charter of the organisation reads that Interpol must not detain citizens for political reasons.
Surprisingly enough, the most repressive Central Asian state – Turkmenistan – takes the third place only by the number of transnational repression use cases, only 37 cases were found.
Kazakhstan (16 cases) and Kyrgyzstan (only 12 cases from 1991 to 2019) use this malpractice the least.
Lemon pointed out the attempts of China in using transnational repression. The authorities of China entered into both bilateral and regional arrangements regarding detention and extradition of citizens wanted by intelligence agencies. China uses this practice most often towards ethnic Uighurs who moved from China to Central Asian states.
According to Lemon, egregious cases happened when in 2017-2018 Chinese security services in cooperation with the security agencies of Tajikistan trafficked almost 90 per cent of ethnic Uighurs who worked at local bazaars of large cities from the country.
Alexander Cooley, Director, Harriman Institute; Claire Tow Professor of Political Science Barnard College; Columbia University, Central Asian Studies, said that the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) plays a very important role in supporting and developing the practice of transnational repression. Since 2009, there has been an arrangement between the SCO members about requesting the arrest and extradition of wanted persons without the need to provide any evidences.
SCO struggles with the three forces of evil: terrorism, extremism and separatism. If we’ve cleared on terrorism more or less, we still have many questions about the definition of extremism and separatism, Cooley said. It’s unclear what SCO members understand by extremism and separatism, which criteria they use to search and detain citizens. Formally, the legal framework is approved and it is actively used.
Just like other experts, Cooley said that the regimes of CA states are successful in strengthening and broadening cooperation in terms of transnational repression. The regimes work both bilaterally, and regionally. In addition to Russia and China, Central Asian states deepen partnership with Turkey in this regard.
According to Cooley, these countries have their own legal framework, which does not and must not comply with international legal norms. However, it is very dangerous as further development of expertise can lead to the revision of international norms.
According to Cooley, the international community, Western countries must pay attention to this issue and build up a dialogue with Central Asian states and at the regional level. For example, the European Union and SCO must raise acute issues focused on observance of human rights in the framework of such dialogues.
Summarising the online meeting, Abakhon Sultonazarov, the regional director of IWPR for CA, agreed that this issue must not be ignored and expressed hope that the mainstream audience would pay attention to this event.
“The growth of transnational repression is one of the major challenges to fostering democracy and supporting the rule of law in Central Asia and in the world in general. I personally learned a great deal about this acute human rights issue and I hope the discussion we had today will contribute to the policy dialogue on the topic,” he said.
The international expert meeting on transnational repression in Central Asian countries was held under the IWPR’s ‘Amplify, Verify, Engage: Information for Democratisation and Good Governance in Eurasia’ Project with financial support of the Norwegian MFA.