HRW: TJ travel ban on rights lawyer

Human Rights Watch news release dated 16 May 2017 (Bishkek), issued jointly with the Norwegian Helsinki Committee, reports that on 14 May 2017, Tajik border guards at the Auchi-Kalyacha border post with Kyrgyzstan prevented rights lawyer Fayzinisso Vohidova from leaving the country. The report states she was detained for eight hours, initially told there was a “defect” in her passport, before guards conceded she had been placed on a list of people banned from leaving Tajikistan, and that there is no avenue to appeal a travel ban. The release states that Vohidova, a Khujand-based lawyer, had been interrogated several times by Tajik security services after making critical remarks about the imprisonment of Buzurgmehr Yorov, sentenced to 25 years. The report states Yorov and Nuriddin Makhkamov were arrested in September 2015 days after offering to represent the opposition Islamic Renaissance Party of Tajikistan and were sentenced in October 2016 to 23 and 21 years for inciting social unrest and calls for overthrowing the government; two years were later added to Yorov’s sentence for quoting Omar Khayyam in court, and new “insulting the president” charges were brought in March 2017. A third lawyer, Shukhrat Kudratov, has been imprisoned since January 2015. The release states Tajikistan became a party to the ICCPR in 1999 and that arbitrary travel bans violate article 12(2). It also cites the March 2017 removal of Hafizamo Gadoeva from a Moscow-bound flight and the December 2016 detention of dissidents’ relatives in Kulob, Dushanbe and Vakhsh. Steve Swerdlow and Marius Fossum are quoted.