HRW: Dissident's family interrogated, threatened

The report states that in a joint news release dated 4 December 2020, Human Rights Watch and the Norwegian Helsinki Committee documented the summoning, interrogation and threatening by Tajik authorities of family members of exiled activist Fatkhuddin Saidmukhidinov, apparently to force him to stop his online criticism of the government. According to the report, Saidmukhidinov has lived in the European Union since 2016 and is a supporter of the Islamic Renaissance Party of Tajikistan (IRPT), which the authorities labelled a terrorist organisation and banned in 2015. The report says he writes and disseminates online criticism of the Tajik government, including through a YouTube channel and a blog, and that after resuming activity in October 2020 following two months of illness, his brother and father were summoned on 19 November 2020 to the State Committee for National Security in Dushanbe, where officials interrogated and threatened them for five hours. It records that officials told the family members Saidmukhidinov must cease all activities, shut down his social media accounts, publicly apologise to security services chief Saimumin Sattorovich Yatimov, and cease associating with Muhammadikboli Sadriddin, an exiled editor of the oppositional website Isloh.net. The officials reportedly told his father “they will bring him back, but they [the family] will never see him again.” The report notes that his family had previously been harassed in December 2019, and situates the case within a wider pattern in which authorities use kidnapping, extradition, forced disappearance and harassment of relatives to target critics abroad.