On April 15, two weeks after Kyrgyz President Sadyr Japarov signed the “foreign representatives” bill into law, the Open Society Foundations cited the law in its announcement that it would close its Kyrgyzstan foundation after 31 years. The Open Society Foundations, formerly the Open Society Institute, is a grantmaking network founded by George Soros. According … Read more
On April 2, Kyrgyzstan’s President Sadyr Japarov signed a bill on foreign funding for non-governmental organizations (NGOs) into law. NGOs that receive funding from abroad will be registered as “foreign representatives,” and they will be subject to costly reporting and auditing requirements. In the many months it took for this piece of legislation to pass … Read more
On April 6, investigative journalist Bolot Temirov claimed in a Telegram post that his wife, Makhabat Tajibek kyzy, had been beaten alongside other detainees by prison guards in Kyrgyzstan. Prison authorities offered a weak denial, stating that pre-trial detention employees do not have the right to beat prisoners. The Kyrgyz Ombudsman Institute visited the pre-trial … Read more
Since January 2022 the Kyrgyz government has been considering the construction of a nuclear power plant (NPP) as a means to address the country’s growing energy needs. At the time, then-Kyrgyz Minister of Energy Doskul Bekmurzaev (later in 2022 he was charged with abuse of power and dismissed) and the general director of Rosatom, the Russian … Read more
As the holy month of Ramadan drew near, Tajikistan’s president expressed his concern about frequent hajj and umrah pilgrimages performed by Tajik citizens and the amount of money spent on them. “In 2023 alone, 63,000 citizens of the country undertook hajj and umrah ceremonies,” Emomali Rahmon said, altogether spending more than 1,200 billion somoni, or … Read more
Mere days after breaking up an alleged assassination plot, Kyrgyz authorities finally got their hands on fugitive former deputy customs head Raimbek Matraimov, whom they’d implicated as behind the plot. On March 23, as Central Asia was reeling from news of the Crocus City Hall attack on the outskirts of Moscow, Kyrgyzstan’s State Committee for … Read more
In the aftermath of the March 22 attack on Crocus City Hall, a concert venue in Krasnogorsk on the outskirts of Moscow, which resulted in at least 139 deaths, Kyrgyzstan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued a statement recommending that Kyrgyz citizens avoid travel to Russia. The Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP) has reportedly claimed responsibility … Read more
When it comes to Central Asia, one of the hottest topics among Western policymakers and scholars alike is China’s engagement in the region, especially since the 2013 launch of the Belt and Road Initiative. In a recent quantitative analysis of Chinese scholarship on Central Asia, Frank Maracchione and Bradley Jardine tackled some prominent assumptions in … Read more
On February 8, the U.S. Department of State hosted the inaugural meeting of the C5+1 Critical Minerals Dialogue (CMD) alongside senior officials from all five Central Asian countries. The event represented the first step in implementing the CMD, announced in September during U.S. President Joe Biden’s historic summit with the Central Asian heads of state … Read more
Following a third and final reading, on March 14 the Kyrgyz parliament adopted without further debate the “foreign representatives” law, which has drawn consistent criticism from domestic civil society activists and international partners. In the wake of its passage – and amid the void between passage and signature into law – the chorus of opposition … Read more