Across Turkmenistan, critics are vanishing - from prisons where sentences end but releases do not come, from deportation centres in neighbouring countries, from the digital spaces that authorities systematically close off. A comprehensive pattern of repression documented over the past year reveals a state that treats the flow of information as a security threat and its own citizens abroad as targets. The human cost of this system extends from individual activists to communities facing water scarcity and environmental degradation that official narratives refuse to acknowledge.
Disappearances, Extended Sentences, and the Mechanics of Silencing
Activist Murat Dushemov completed his four-year prison sentence in June. He was not released. Instead, authorities charged him with beating a fellow inmate - a charge widely regarded as fabricated - and sentenced him to eight additional years in a closed trial on 16 September. The pattern is not unique to his case. Dozens of individuals imprisoned in connection with an alleged assassination attempt on then-president Saparmurat Niyazov in 2002 remain held beyond the expiration of their terms, their whereabouts and condition systematically withheld from families and international monitors alike.
The reach of Turkmenistani repression extends well beyond its borders. In April, bloggers Alisher Sakhatov and Abdulla Orusov were arrested in Türkiye and placed in a deportation centre. By July they had vanished from it. Neither the Turkmenistani nor the Turkish government has disclosed what happened to them. In May, activist Umida Bekchanova was also arrested in Türkiye facing deportation; her legal status remained unresolved by year's end. Videoblogger Didar Amansakhatov disappeared in November after posting criticism of meat prices and was subsequently reported dead under circumstances that have not been explained. Taken together, these cases describe a transnational repression infrastructure - the use of bilateral legal mechanisms and extrajudicial means to silence critics wherever they are located.
Authorities in Balkan province went so far as to ban private law firms and printing shops from helping citizens draft, print, or copy appeals to the president - with licence revocation threatened for non-compliance. The prohibition is revealing: even the formal act of petitioning the state has been made hazardous.
Torture, Criminalization, and Detention Without Oversight
The UN Committee against Torture, reviewing Turkmenistan in April, expressed deep concern about the widespread practice of beatings, denial of medical care, and prolonged solitary confinement in detention facilities. No independent oversight exists - neither domestic nor international monitors are permitted access to penitentiary institutions. This absence of scrutiny is itself a policy choice. Without external review, the conditions inside remain effectively unverifiable and, for those held there, uncontestable.
Among the documented abuses, security services reportedly detained more than twenty men and adolescent boys suspected of same-sex relations, subjected them to torture and ill-treatment, and used that coercion to extort money. Consensual sexual conduct between men remains a criminal offence in Turkmenistan, punishable by up to two years' imprisonment. Women and girls believed to be lesbian were reportedly arrested and their families pressured to arrange their marriages. The use of criminal law to target sexual identity, combined with documented torture of those detained on such grounds, places Turkmenistan among the most hostile environments for LGBTI people in Central Asia.
Information Control in a Closed-Off Digital Environment
Internet access in Turkmenistan is among the most restricted in the world - expensive, slow, and filtered. Authorities block access to websites carrying independent reporting and maintain tight controls over VPN services, the primary tool through which citizens might otherwise circumvent censorship. Independent journalists and local sources face intimidation as a routine condition of their work. When journalist Soltan Achilova was forcibly hospitalised and allegedly poisoned - apparently to prevent her from attending an international human rights event - the UN Special Rapporteur on human rights defenders submitted a formal communication to the authorities. It was ignored.
The Third UN Conference on Landlocked Developing Countries was held in Turkmenistan in August, attended by the UN Secretary-General, with a stated focus on trade, connectivity, and sustainable development. Turkmenistan's human rights record was not on the agenda. The event illustrated the gap that often exists between international engagement and accountability: multilateral gatherings can proceed in full awareness of abuses without making those abuses a condition of participation.
A Carbon-Intensive Economy and the Environment It Leaves Behind
Turkmenistan possesses some of the world's largest natural gas reserves, and its economy is built around them. According to the UN, it is the most carbon-intensive economy in the region - a status that directly contradicts the country's stated commitments under the Paris Agreement and the Global Methane Pledge. Rather than moving away from this dependency, authorities are deepening it: plans are in progress to expand extraction at the Galkynysh gas deposit, one of the largest in the world, and to construct a pipeline to India.
Meanwhile, water scarcity is eroding the agricultural base that much of the population depends on. Factors driving the crisis include the absence of a coherent national water strategy, neglected infrastructure, and deeply inefficient agricultural water use - problems that compound over time and affect food security directly. A state whose revenues flow from hydrocarbons has limited structural incentive to invest in the water management reforms that its population needs. The two crises - environmental and authoritarian - are not separate. They share the same governance failure at their root.