Bishkek, Paris, 12 December 2025 - The Observatory for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders, a partnership of the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) and the World Organisation Against Torture (OMCT), strongly condemns the politically motivated refusal by the Kyrgyzstani authorities to allow a delegation of FIDH representatives into Kyrgyzstan.
On the early morning of 12 December 2025, Kyrgyzstani border guards at the Manas International Airport in Bishkek denied three FIDH representatives scheduled to participate in a leading human rights film festival entry into the territory of Kyrgyzstan.
The border officials confiscated the passports of all FIDH delegates and provided no motivated explanation or written notification detailing the reasons for the denial. Subsequently, all three delegates were escorted to the next flights, forced to return to their origin airports, where they received their passports back. The absence of legal grounds and formal procedure effectively blocks any avenue to appeal the decision.
The delegation members were scheduled to participate in the 19th International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival organised by FIDH’s Kyrgyz member organisation, Bir Duino, which is taking place from 12 to 16 December 2025 in Bishkek, alongside other reputable human rights experts from the region. The program includes several workshops focused on the alarming human rights situation in the Kyrgyz Republic.
The refusal to allow FIDH delegates into the country comes ten days after the Russian Federation included FIDH in the register of “undesirable organisations”, a decision condemned by the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Russian Federation.
The Observatory strongly underlines that this decision by the Kyrgyzstani authorities not only constitutes as a serious breach of Kyrgyzstan’s international obligations, including rights to freedom of movement, expression, and association, but also as a demonstration of alarming complicity with Russia’s campaign of repression against civil society and human rights defenders. It is also a direct attack on the work of FIDH’s Kyrgyzstani member organisations, who continue their legitimate work against government repression in a climate of increasing fear and hostility.
The Observatory expresses its grave concern and urgently calls upon the Kyrgyzstani authorities to:
1. Immediately provide a full, official, and legally sound justification for the denial of entry and the deportation of FIDH’s delegation;
2. Allow immediate and unrestricted access to all human rights defenders possessing valid documentation into the country, refraining from any form of politically motivated discrimination;
3. Immediately cease all measures demonstrating complicity in Russia’s repression against civil society and human rights defenders, specifically against organisations and individuals labelled as “foreign agents” or “undesirable;
4. At all times uphold Kyrgyzstan’s obligation not to extradite individuals to countries where they face risks of torture or other forms of ill-treatment, such as the Russian Federation, Belarus, and others; and
5. Immediately cease all repressive measures that restrict, silence and stigmatise the legitimate work of Kyrgyz civil society organisations and human rights defenders inside the country, and ensure full respect of the country’s international human rights obligations, particularly regarding the rights to freedom of movement, freedom of association, and freedom of expression as enshrined in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and other international human rights instruments.
