In Turkmenistan, positions of commissioners for the protection of children, women, and entrepreneurs' rights will be established. The announcement was made on April 6th by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs during a meeting of the Interdepartmental Commission on ensuring Turkmenistan's compliance with international human rights and humanitarian law obligations, as reported by Orient.
Currently, the Turkmenistan Ombudsman's office consists of only one department dealing with human rights protection and citizens' complaints, with a staff of nine people.
The Ombudsman position was established in Turkmenistan in 2018 and has been held by Yazdursun Gurbannazarova since then. Her annual reports indicate that out of hundreds of complaints received each year, less than twenty are deemed worthy of attention, mostly related to social protection rather than human rights in the UN's interpretation.
The first Ombudsman report was presented in 2018, with significant portions of the text copied from open sources, such as a thesis titled "The Activities of the Human Rights Commissioner in the Republic of Kazakhstan" from 2015.
In 2019, the report delved into some characteristic issues in Turkmenistan, including bureaucracy in obtaining passports and bank cards, unjust punishment for engaging in prostitution, and Gurbannazarova's visits to places of detention.
The 2021 report revealed that the Ombudsman addressed only 17 complaints throughout the year, some of which were intriguing, such as challenging illegal money collection from public sector employees and coercion to cultivate silkworms. However, the 2022 report focused mainly on social protection, housing and utilities, and business disputes, loosely associated with human rights.
In 2023, the Ombudsman reported receiving 523 complaints in the past year, primarily related to housing issues. Most cases were resolved through consultations, with only 15 new complaints and three from the previous year being satisfied. Among them was a case where a man was cheated in a car repair scam. It remains unclear why the Ombudsman, rather than the police, handled such matters.
One would hope that increasing the number of Ombudsmen will lead to a higher rate of resolved complaints. It would also be beneficial if the Ombudsmen focused on human rights in the broader sense: freedom of speech, religion, movement, protection against torture, release of political prisoners. However, currently, the authorities seem to prefer to silence the existence of such issues.
