“Turkmenistan has long been a closed country for independent human rights scrutiny. The pattern of persecution of relatives of activists who live abroad shows the lengths to which its government will go to keep the world from knowing the scale of the human rights violations there.”
Our weekly round-up of the major news stories from across Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia that have taken place over the past seven days, including Amazon's official entry to the Central Asian marketplace.
The Committee to Protect Journalists has joined human rights organizations in urging the authoritarian leadership of Turkmenistan to end the practice of threatening and harassing exiled journalists' family members and allow all journalists living abroad to return to the country and work in safety.
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Hungarian opposition parties – including the former far-right Jobbik party as well as the centre-left Momentum party – will hold primaries this year to select joint candidates to contest the 2022 parliamentary election, it was announced this week. The Fidesz party of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has won three successive landslide victories since 2010, in part due to an election system that favours the ruling party over the fragmented opposition. The primary elections, set for September, will select a single opposition candidate in each of Hungary’s 106 electoral districts, while each district will also pick its preferred candidate for prime minister. In 2019, the opposition united in a similar fashion to back Gergely Karácsony as mayor of Budapest, who subsequently defeated the Fidesz candidate.