Human rights organizations Human Rights Watch (HRW), International Partnership for Human Rights (IPHR) and the Turkmen Initiative for Human Rights (TIHR) forwarded the statement to the President of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) Suma Chakrabarti to urge the bank to refrain from expanding cooperation with Turkmenistan’s authorities and provide additional lending until the Turkmen authorities demonstrate tangible and measurable, rather than declarative progress in respecting human rights and democracy.
The human rights activists call on the EBRD to set out concrete and measurable benchmarks which will be used to assess progress and to urge the authorities to comply with the requirements, adopted by the European Parliament in March 2019.
It is highlighted in the statement that the Turkmen government is undertaking some measures to modernize the legislation but the adoption of laws in Turkmenistan does not imply their implementation in practice.
The full text of the statement in English is available here.