During the UN review of Tajikistan’s human rights record, Japan called on Dushanbe to ratify the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance. Kanatsu Takashi, First Secretary at Japan’s Permanent Mission in Geneva, made this recommendation in his statement on 5 November.
The statement was published on the mission’s official website on 6 November. Japan also recommended developing a national action plan to promote respect for human rights in business activities. According to its representative, both recommendations had also been raised during the previous review cycle.
In the same statement, Japan welcomed Tajikistan’s adoption of the National Human Rights Strategy through 2038 and its ratification of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities as positive steps.
What Does Enforced Disappearance Mean?
Under Article 2 of the Convention, enforced disappearance means arrest, abduction or another form of deprivation of liberty involving state agents, or persons acting with the state’s authorisation, support or acquiescence, followed by a refusal to acknowledge the deprivation of liberty or the concealment of the person’s fate or whereabouts. As a result, the person is placed outside the protection of the law. Not every case of a missing person automatically falls within this definition.
Article 17 prohibits secret detention and provides for official registers of detainees, detention in officially recognised facilities, and the ability to communicate with family members and a lawyer. Article 24 establishes victims’ rights to the truth and reparation. Article 16 prohibits transferring a person to a country where there are substantial grounds for believing that they would be at risk of enforced disappearance.
Why Is This Relevant to Tajikistan?
Following its 2019 visit to Tajikistan, the UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances reported in document A/HRC/45/13/Add.1 on cases involving citizens who had been living abroad and were forcibly returned. According to the Working Group, they included political opponents, among them members of the Islamic Renaissance Party of Tajikistan and Group 24. Some reappeared in detention facilities in Tajikistan after a period of disappearance, while the whereabouts of others remained unknown.
The same report also presents the authorities’ position: they maintained that these individuals had returned voluntarily or had been extradited in accordance with the law and relevant agreements. The UN Working Group nevertheless noted that relatives had been left without information about their whereabouts.
In its 2024 follow-up report, A/HRC/57/54/Add.3, the Working Group expressed concern about the lack of significant progress in establishing the truth and ensuring accountability for disappearances during the civil war. It also noted that, at the time of its assessment, enforced disappearance had not been established as a separate criminal offence in national legislation and no steps had been taken towards accession to the Convention.
Why Does Ratification Matter?
The legal basis of Japan’s recommendation is that the state should have specific obligations to prevent enforced disappearances, search for disappeared persons and investigate such cases. Accession alone will not resolve past cases, but implementing the Convention requires changes to legislation and the practices of the authorities. This explanation of the recommendation’s significance is based on UN documents.
Cases in which Tajik opposition figures disappeared abroad and were later found to be held in detention facilities in Tajikistan have been documented repeatedly. In May 2024, Human Rights Watch, the Norwegian Helsinki Committee and IPHR reported that Nasimjon Sharifov had disappeared in Türkiye on 23 February and Suhrob Zafar on 10 March of that year. At the time, the organisations called on the Tajik authorities to officially confirm Suhrob Zafar’s detention and whereabouts.
According to the US Department of State’s 2024 human rights report, it was not until August that Tajikistan’s Prosecutor General’s Office announced that both men were in Dushanbe. Official confirmation therefore came approximately five months after their disappearances, while the prosecutor’s office did not explain the circumstances of their transfer to Tajikistan. In its 2026 submission to the UN, Human Rights Watch also referred to at least seven Pamiri activists who were forcibly disappeared in Russia and abducted to Tajikistan between November 2021 and August 2022.
Among the cases that remain unresolved is the disappearance of political activist and blogger Ehson Odinaev, known as “Sarafrozi Olamafruz.” According to a statement by the Association for Human Rights in Central Asia, he left his home in St Petersburg on 19 May 2015 and never returned. Human Rights Watch and the Norwegian Helsinki Committee reported that his relatives suspected that the Tajik authorities had forcibly returned him and were holding him at an undisclosed location, or that he had been killed. These are his relatives’ suspicions, and his fate has not been independently confirmed. In its 2024 report on transnational repression, HRW also described Odinaev’s whereabouts as unknown.
