Human Rights Watch has praised the European Union for halting a trade deal with Turkmenistan, the bizarrely authoritarian, oil-and-gas-soaked Central Asian republic where a journalist died last month under suspicious circumstances.

An excerpt from the BBC story:

Human Rights Watch said the decision showed that the EU would not allow abusive governments to profit from it.

An EU committee said it would not approve the deal without sustained improvement on human rights.

The EU called for the release of political prisoners and freedom for non-governmental organisations.

"This is a landmark decision against tyranny," said Holly Cartner, Europe and Central Asia director at Human Rights Watch, of the decision by the EU Parliament's International Trade Committee.

The committee resolution stated that the EU would only approve an interim trade agreement with Turkmenistan if "clear, tangible, and sustained progress" on the human rights situation was achieved.

Death in custody

Turkmenistan is effectively a one-party state run since Soviet times by Saparmyrat Niyazov, and has no independent media.

I mentioned Turkmenistan in a 'Borat' post. I'll reproduce some of that information here (from the BBC):

President: Saparmyrat Atayevich Niyazov

President Niyazov: Enjoys an unrivalled personality cult

Born in 1940, Saparmyrat Niyazov became Turkmen Communist Party chief in 1985. In 1991 he was elected the first president of independent Turkmenistan, and in 1999 the country's supreme legislative body, the Mejlis, made him president-for-life.

He styles himself Turkmenbashi, or Father of the Turkmen. A cult of personality is everywhere in evidence. Turkmens are expected to take spiritual guidance from his book, Ruhnama, a collection of thoughts on Turkmen culture and history.

He surprised many observers in April 2005 when he called for contested presidential elections to be held in 2009. When politicians later implored him to change his mind, he repeated that the elections should take place but said that he would return to the question in 2009.

He has chosen to spend large sums of public money on numerous grandiose projects but not on social welfare.

The president seeks to influence even mundane aspects of people's lives. When he quit smoking after major heart surgery in 1997, Mr Niyazov ordered all his ministers to do likewise and banned smoking in public places. He later declared a ban on young men wearing beards and long hair. He has also banned opera and ballet and the playing of recorded music on television and at public events and weddings.

Here's Human Rights Watch's Turkmenistan page.

And here is some of what Rachel Denber, deputy director of HRW's Europe and Central Asia division, wrote in a commentary published in The New Statesman in July:

Too often, the nightmare in the central Asian state of Turkmenistan is treated as though it were comedy.

The antics of the country's autocratic leader, Saparmurat Niyazov, are certainly bizarre: he changed the names of the months in honour of members of his own family, and he had a gold statue of himself put on top of a building in his capital - a statue that revolves so it always faces the sun.

Such absurdities tend to mask the fact that Turkmenistan has one of the most repressive regimes in the world, one that ranks alongside Burma and North Korea but attracts far less international condemnation.