In Turkmenistan, well-known human rights activist went at large
On September 6, Turkmen labor rights activist Gaspar Matalaev went at large. According to Turkmen.news, he served his unlawful term of three years in full. At the moment, the activist is at home with his relatives.
G.Matalaev, who independently monitored the use of forced labor during cotton picking, was detained at the night of October 4-5, 2016, at his home in Turkmenabad. Prior to this, he repeatedly came to collection points and went to cotton fields, where he questioned doctors, teachers and other public servants who were forced to pick cotton under the threat of dismissal, why they were going to the field, and were not at their workplace in the school classroom or hospitals. Gaspar also talked with schoolchildren who went to the fields instead of their parents or as a hired force and thereby, to the detriment of their studies, helping their family financially.
On October 2, 2016, Turkmen.news published a photo report of G. Matalaev under the heading “People were taken in a truck like sheep for sale at the market”. Two days later, at a meeting of the State Security Council, Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov announced to the then Minister of National Security Dovrangeldy Bayramov a severe reprimand “for improper performance of official duties, weakening control over the activities of subordinate services”.
That night they came for Gaspar. At the police station, employees of the Ministry of National Security under torture by electric shock forced him to sign a confession of fraud and giving a bribe, and a month later, the judge of Turkmenabad city court Gulshirin Sukhanberdyeva sentenced the activist to three years in prison.
During all three years of his imprisonment, international human rights and trade union organizations spoke in support of Gaspar, and more than 100 thousand people around the world signed the petition to the world’s largest non-governmental organization against modern forms of slavery Freedom United.
In April 2018, the UN working group on arbitrary detention recognized the arrest of the activist and his detention as arbitrary, believing that G. Matalaev was deprived of the right to an independent and impartial court and convicted of the peaceful exercise of his right to freedom of expression. The working group recommended that the Turkmen authorities release G. Matalaev and give him the right to compensation. However, the authorities ignored all calls to release the activist.
In May 2019, the International Labor Rights Forum awarded Gaspar Matalaev the Defender of Labor Rights for reporting the issue of forced labor during cotton picking.
Currently, 70 companies – among them, for example, Adidas, Nike, Levi Strauss & Co, Amazon and H&M – have signed the “Turkmen Cotton Vow”, refusing to buy cotton from Turkmenistan, and 84 investors of these companies with assets of almost $860 billion have signed relevant investor’s statement, which notes the importance of preventing the presence of Turkmen cotton in the supply chain of companies as long as the compulsion’s system exists in the country.
