International Human Rights Campaign "Prove They Are Alive!" updated the list of prisoners who disappeared in Turkmenistan's prisons, Gundogar reports .

The study lists the names and cases of 162 people whose fate remains unknown after they were sent to Turkmen prisons.

The previous list, compiled in 2019, included 121 names of the missing. Human rights defenders explain the sharp increase in the number of such cases by the fact that new certificates on disappearances were added to the document in the period from 2016 to 2018. They were not included in the list earlier due to lack of sufficient data.

Of the 162 documented cases of enforced disappearance, 97 are currently relevant, of which there is no information about the fate of people in 72 cases. For 25 convicts there is additional information that requires further confirmation (for example, the death in custody of five of them). After its clarification, they can be excluded from the list.

The remaining 65 cases were excluded from the list for the following reasons: 29 people died in custody, 10 were released, 26 continue to serve time, but they were allowed to meet with relatives and receive parcels.

Human rights activists believe that the government of Turkmenistan continues to hide the truth about the deaths of prisoners from the list of disappeared. Given that the Turkmen authorities refuse to conduct full-fledged investigations, from the point of view of international law, a number of cases can be considered as extrajudicial executions.

Source: Chronicles of Turkmenistan