Velina Todorova, the UN Child Rights Committee: “How long will it take the [Turkmen] government to start implementing the recommendations?”
Vepa Hajiyev, Head of the Turkmenistan government delegation: “We are still learning the best international practices”.
Turkmenistan was reviewed by the UN Child Rights Committee (CRC) on August 28-29, 2024. As a party to the Child Rights Convention Turkmenistan is required to undergo regular reviews by the Committee of 18 independent international experts on how it is implementing the Convention, its Optional Protocols, and the Committee’s previous recommendations. The recorded sessions by Day 1 and Day 2 are available on the UN Web TV.
After reviewing combined fifth and sixth reports submitted by Turkmenistan on October 16, 2020 the Committee raised a comprehensive list of issues. During the in-person review the Committee members raised them again, with particular focus on the following three key issues: absence of statistics, lack of national plan, enforcement and implementation.
It is important to note that no study or research on children’s rights and situation in Turkmenistan have been initiated, developed and conducted by the government of Turkmenistan.
The Turkmen government delegation has continued use of misinformation, misleading statements and justifications for the absence of statistics. The members of the delegation predominantly read out the national laws providing no concrete measures or data. The head of the delegation, Vepa Hajiyev publicly acknowledged the practice of having two sets of statistics: one for international organizations and one for internal use that are kept secret and used for decision making purposes.
Many of the issues and questions raised by the Committee members were neither addressed by the government in its written reply submitted on 18 July 2024 nor during the in-person review on August 28-29, 2024.
Some these issues are summarized below:
Amending national legislation and constitution – while some national legislation was amended to ensure the explicit prohibition of all forms of discrimination based on disability, no changes were made into the constitution. The government stated that there was no recorded incidence of discrimination but it had not clarified how exactly they prevent discrimination against children in marginalized and disadvantaged communities.
Engaging children in decision making – the government failed to provide a concrete answer on how they engaged civil society organizations and children in developing the National Plan of Action on Children’s Rights for 2023–2028 and state policies pertaining to children. A Committee member, Philip Jaffe asked “Please tell us about children’s access to the Internet, social media in Turkmenistan. Do you have any popular children’s organizations?” There is not a single governmental organization (out of 134 GONGOs) that works with children according to the government delegation. Meanwhile, the UNICEF evaluation report from 2018–2022 showed, there was a lack of involvement of civil society and participation of children. There were no government-led comprehensive needs assessments of children and their families.
Collecting and disseminating disaggregated data – the government delegation failed to share disaggregated and comprehensive data on children and their wellbeing. Data on children are published in the statistical collection “The Situation of Children in Turkmenistan” once every 5 years. However, such statistical books are only available in print and not openly available online, it is not circulated to the public, and people often have to pay and register to access it. Meanwhile, the State Statistics Committee of Turkmenistan is still working on processing the data after almost 2 years of collecting the census data.
Children living in poverty – according to the government there are no children living in extreme poverty in Turkmenistan as extreme poverty was eliminated in 2000. Currently the government is working to improve the measurement of the relative level of poverty, which according to MICS 2015 was almost 0%.
Children living in institutions – according to the Ministry of Health and Medical Industry of Turkmenistan, the number of children aged 0 to 3 years in orphanages has increased by 5.9% from 2022 to 2023. According to the Ministry of Education of Turkmenistan, the number of children in orphanages increased by 17.4% from 2022 to 2023. However, they do not specify why there is this increase. The government does not provide statistics on the number of children living with their parents.
Children with disabilities attending special schools – there is a tendency towards an increase in the number of children with disabilities in boarding schools. For example, 2021 – 4482, 2022 – 4770 and 2023 – 4864. This is due to the fact that disabilities in children are identified at an early stage and regular surveys are conducted on the situation of children with disabilities covered by the social protection system in Turkmenistan. According to the Pension Fund, in 2023 the number of recipients of state disability benefits under the age of 18 was 26,004 people, which is an increase of 4.0% compared to 2022. However, further analysis is required to understand the real reasons behind the increasing number of children with disabilities.
Ensuring children’s freedom of expression – the government mentioned involving youth as Young SDG Ambassadors. However, nothing is stated on how exactly the government ensures the freedom of expression of children in practice, particularly those who are not involved in SDGs promotion.
Safeguarding children from censorship and ensuring unrestricted access to information – the government also failed to address the Committee’s concern on safeguarding children from censorship and digital surveillance, while ensuring their unrestricted ability to seek, receive and share information and ideas through various platforms. Turkmen citizens, including children, have limited and controlled access to the Internet. It remains slow, expensive and censored while those in remote areas do not have stable connection.
Promoting child-rights education and non-violent forms of discipline – instead of promoting child-rights education, illegality of corporal punishment, and providing complaint mechanisms, the government informs students and their parents about problematic behaviors among minors and where parents need to pay attention. Meanwhile, the UNICEF survey data reveals that in families where there is physical abuse by husband/partner, children see scenes of beatings. In 25% of such families, children witnessed a beating at least once. Similarly, 70% of children between the age of 1-14 were subjected to at least one form of violent discipline method while 58% experienced psychological aggression. Meanwhile, the concept of corporal punishment is not fully understood in Turkmenistan according to the Committee’s observations.
Promoting inclusive education for children with disabilities – the government mentioned that efforts are being made to include children with disabilities in the mainstream education system and that every year the number of children with disabilities studying in regular classes increases. However, they did not provide any data such as how many children with disabilities are currently studying in mainstream schools and how this number has changed overtime.
Developing preschool education in remote and rural areas – as of 2024, there are 1,099 preschools in Turkmenistan with 214,803 children. Of these 214 preschools are in rural areas with 32,957 children. However, it is unclear how many children are there in total and what share of all children are attending these preschools.
Increasing the number of psychologists and social workers to support children with disabilities – according to government data, the number of general psychologists graduating from universities has increased from 8 graduates annually in 2018-2022 to 20 graduates in 2022. However, these are general psychologists and they might not have training to work with children, and it does not mean these graduates pursue a career as psychologists. Social services are provided in 18 etraps and cities of the country. However, this is not sufficient given that Turkmenistan has 43 districts, 6 etraps, 51 towns, 62 villages, 605 rural municipal units and 1719 rural settlements.
Improving access for adolescents to sexual and reproductive health services – the representative of the Ministry of Health could not name the reasons for the highest infant mortality rate in the country (32 cases per 1000 live births). She talked about the nonexistent center for adolescent health in Turkmenistan while failing to provide any statistics on teenage health or access to services. The representative from the Ministry of Education provided complete misinformation on sexuality education in schools in Turkmenistan. The concept and the program of sexuality education does not exist in Turkmenistan while 20 out of every 1,000 girls aged 15-19 are getting pregnant. Of all unintended pregnancies, 83% end up in abortion. But since many unsafe abortions go unreported, there is no record of how many young girls opt for unsafe abortions. This is in the backdrop of the government shortening the period for legal abortion from 12 to 5 weeks.
Eliminating the practice of informal child marriage and lowering the age of marriage – in exceptional cases, if there are valid reasons, the guardianship and trusteeship authorities may, at the request of persons wishing to marry, reduce the marriage age, but not by more than one year. However, it is unclear what are these circumstances and how does the government guarantee that parents or children do not overuse this. The government delegation acknowledged cases of early child marriage but failed to share any statistics or measures taken to combat it by saying that the problem does not have “deep and large-scale character”.
Prohibiting child labour – the government mentioned the roadmap adopted in collaboration with the ILO for 2024–2025 which includes a list of jobs with harmful and dangerous working conditions which prohibits involvement of children under 18. It also includes cotton harvesting. Until recently children were forced to collect cotton. This practice, while officially stopped, unofficially children still skip school or after school work in the cotton fields due to economic hardships and other reasons.
A complaint mechanism that does not work – the government mentioned only one complaint that was submitted by a 17-year-old boy to the Office of the Ombudsman describing difficulties in obtaining some official documents from the public institutions. The government delegation had a hard time explaining how children in Turkmenistan can file their complaints with a designated government agency. The complaint mechanism is not clear and child friendly.
