Abstract

Since their independence in 1991, the five Central Asian countries have failed to overcome endemic corruption and clientelism in order to move toward greater democracy and respect for human rights. In Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan, as elsewhere in the region, human rights depend on the political will of individual state leaders and are used solely to affirm authoritarian statehood. At the same time, civil society and international governmental organizations (IGOs), namely the United Nations (UN), the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), and the European Union (EU), have scrutinized the status of human rights in many post-Soviet states. In this chapter, I will highlight trends in both the realization and the violation of universal human rights and law for each Central Asian state and the role that international organizations have played in the past decade.