Kyrgyz president must release journalist Azimjon Askarov amid COVID-19 epidemic

Gulnoza Said
Journalist Azimjon Askarov has been imprisoned in Kyrgyzstan since 2010 on trumped-up charges. Photo provided by Askarov's family.

Journalist Azimjon Askarov has been imprisoned in Kyrgyzstan since 2010 on trumped-up charges. Photo provided by Askarov's family.

CPJ today joined eight other human rights and press freedom organizations to call for the immediate release of journalist and human rights defender Azimjon Askarov, who has been serving a life sentence in retaliation for his reporting since June 2010.

The joint letter to Kyrgyzstan President Sooronbay Jeenbekov, led by Human Rights Watch, notes that Askarov, 68, has suffered from deteriorating health amid harsh prison conditions and is at a high risk of death with the spread of COVID-19 in Kyrgyzstan. On March 22, the government of Kyrgyzstan declared a state of emergency and introduced restrictions on public life after several people in the country were diagnosed with the coronavirus.

The letter demands that the Kyrgyzstan government finally act on the 2016 call by the U.N. Human Rights Committee for Askarov to be immediately released and his conviction quashed.

Read the full letter in English and Russian.

Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator, is a journalist and press freedom advocate with over 20 years of experience in New York, Prague, Bratislava, and Tashkent. At CPJ, she has conducted several missions to countries in Europe and Central Asia, and advocated for greater press freedom and the release of jailed journalists at forums including the U.S. Congress, the United Nations, and the OSCE. Before joining CPJ in 2016, she was a journalist and covered issues including elections, politics, media, religion, and human rights with a focus on Central Asia, Russia, and Turkey. She also worked in communications for the United Nations Secretariat and the UNDP. Her op-eds, reports, and comments have appeared in CNN, the BBC, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, PBS, NBC, Voice of America, RFE/RL, Fergana, Eurasianet, and other outlets, and she authored the Uzbekistan chapter in a book on the study of social entrepreneurship. Follow her on LinkedIn.

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