New York, April 17, 2026—The Committee to Protect Journalists has submitted a report on the state of press freedom in Tajikistan to the United Nations Human Rights Council ahead of November’s 53rd Universal Periodic Review (UPR) session.
The submission details a significant deterioration of media freedom — in what was already one of the world’s most restrictive environments for the press — since Tajikistan’s last review in 2021, with a government crackdown intensifying already pervasive media self-censorship.
Since 2022, nine journalists have been sentenced to lengthy prison terms of up to 20 years, making Tajikistan the world’s 10th-worst jailer of journalists in 2025. CPJ’s submission identifies the following troubling trends in these cases:
- Misuse of counter-extremism and counterterrorism laws: eight of the nine journalists were convicted on apparently baseless charges of extremism and terrorism, despite calls during the last UPR for Tajikistan to reform overly broad counterterrorism and counter-extremism legislation to prevent abuse.
- Torture and ill-treatment: allegations of torture and ill-treatment to obtain false confessions feature in the majority of these cases. One journalist said the mistreatment — beatings and electrocution — was so extreme he “thought [he] would die.”
- Severe violations of the right to a fair trial: all nine journalists were convicted in secretive, closed-doors trials held in detention centers, with little or no public information about the allegations against them; lawyers were made to sign non-disclosure agreements and lawyers and relatives were intimidated from speaking to rights groups or the press.
The report further documents an uptick in transnational repression of exiled journalists, particularly in absentia criminal charges and harassment of family members in Tajikistan.
Read the full report here.
This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Lauren Wolfe.