In one case, a woman had been subjected to 15 years of violence by her husband. “He would beat her severely until she would lose consciousness,” the lawyer said. To try to escape her husband’s asian-date.net/central-asia/kyrgyzstan-women threats, the woman jumped from a building with her baby. With no regard for the domestic abuse that drove her to jump, officials prosecuted her for attempting to kill her child. She is awaiting appeal in detention and is not receiving psychological or other assistance as a victim of abuse, the lawyer said. Of 7,178 family violence cases registered in 2018, 369 serious criminal cases were initiated – approximately 5 percent.
A woman holds up photos of two women who were killed by their kidnappers in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, on April 8, 2021. As younger people in Kyrgyzstan move to urban areas or abroad, rural areas in Kyrgyzstan are increasingly left to women. In this interview, Dr. Koichumanova talks about some of her findings and shares her views on how to expand women’s prospects in Kyrgyz society. The project has been implemented with the support of the National Academy of Sciences of the Kyrgyz Republic and the Konrad Adenauer Foundation. For the last few years, Professor Cholpon Koichumanova has been working on a project studying the role and place of women in modern Kyrgyzstan. “There is a criminal liability for the threat of using violence that is dangerous to life and health . But criminal liability occurs only if there are sufficient grounds to fear the implementation of the threat,” she said.
- Only one in 1,500 cases of abduction results in a judicial sentence in Kyrgyzstan .
- The Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Prosecutor General’s Office of the Kyrgyz Republic refused to grant us interviews.
- For the last few years, Professor Cholpon Koichumanova has been working on a project studying the role and place of women in modern Kyrgyzstan.
- The UN Working Groupondiscrimination against women and girlswas created by the Human Rights Council in 2011 to identify, promote and exchange views, in consultation with States and other actors, on good practices related to the elimination of laws that discriminate against women.
In April, his relatives in his family home in Balykchy were questioned and threatened with being searched. On 16 November, Altyn Kapalova, a feminist artist and writer, lost a final appeal at Bishkek City Court in her case against the State Registration Service in favour of putting matronymics instead of patronymics in the passports of her three children. The vaccination programme was delayed by a shortage of vaccines and hampered by inefficient distribution of humanitarian aid, but by September over 1 million people had had at least one vaccination. In June vaccination was made compulsory for all health workers and later for other categories, causing controversy, although sanctions for those refusing were unclear. The Council of Europe’s Venice Commission and the OSCE expressed concerns over the “overly prominent” role of the president, the weakened role of the parliament and “potential encroachments on judicial independence”. For women in the United States, students may wish to start with the Centers for Disease Control report, Safe Motherhood.
In 2019, she was transferred to the passport control department at Manas International Airport, and soon she received her first promotion to the officer rank. “My goal is to get the rank of colonel, since now that I have become a service officer, I can count on a long-term career in the Border Service,” – Nurkyz shares her plans. For three years of border service work, 28-year-old Nurkyz Nurlanova has maintained more than 150 automated passport readers at the Manas International Airport in Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan. Women in Kyrgyzstan also face other dilemmas in a society that often blames a woman for the breakup of her marriage. Statistics from 2019 show that 86 percent of women withdrew their abuse complaints.
Freedom of expression
Sometimes, grooms use rape or other physical violence to coerce women to consent to marriage – though that’s not the norm. The government is supporting awareness raising campaigns, and the NGO “Women Support Centre” has been working with the government to monitor the impact of the new legislation. These measures should be stepped up, along with community leaders speaking out, more legal accountability for perpetrators, and increased assistance and recourse for victims. Since Kyrgyzstan’s independence in 1991, Kyrgyz have often asserted their ethnicity and traditions as a way to distance themselves from their Soviet past and affirm the country’s independent identity. For the same reasons, incidents are underreported to the authorities, particularly if the woman stays with her abductor. Nurkyz works at the Manas International Airport border checkpoints as an officer of the Automated Border Control System .
Police registered 7,178 cases for all of 2018, more than half of which involved physical violence. Publicly available data does not specify the number of bride kidnapping cases reported or prosecuted. The government should monitor responses by law enforcement and judicial bodies to complaints of domestic violence and early and forced marriage, including the issuing and enforcement of protection orders and prosecution of cases. Widespread education and awareness-raising campaigns are needed to change behavior and combat harmful attitudes. When police left the two in a room alone together, Bodoshev stabbed Burulai multiple times and reportedly carved her initials and those of the fiancé she had intended to marry into her skin. The killing spurred public pressure to tackle bride kidnapping, a practice some in Kyrgyzstan defend as “tradition” and which persists despite criminalization and toughened legislation. Gender inequality and discrimination serve as a root cause of gender-based violence in Kyrgyzstan, a pervasive and persistent concern among human rights activists, including Bishkek Feminists Initiatives .
Human Rights Seminar Returns to the OSCE with a Focus on Women and Girls
Abduraupova believes the widespread practice of questioning the victim and her abuser together in the same room must change because it puts unnecessary pressure on the woman. In some cases, the perpetrators are sentenced to a few days in custody for beating their wives.
In March 2010, opposition politician Roza Otunbaeva rose to power as caretaker president following a revolution against Bakiyev’s government, becoming Kyrgyzstan’s first female president. In Kyrgyzstan, the law enforcement agencies are very male-dominated, and women mostly do paperwork. A gender-balanced composition of state bodies could help to prioritize the issue of domestic violence. It is important to cultivate social empathy and mindfulness regarding women’s rights, raise awareness among law enforcement agencies and educate women and girls about their rights. In addition, in recent years, women have turned to the traditions and skills of needlework inherited from their mothers and grandmothers—carpet-weaving, embroidery, making products from felt, etc.—to alleviate poverty and unemployment.