Tajikistan, where wearing hijab is a crime, 685 crimes have been reported first seven months of this year,and of this number 643 cases have been women wearing hijab.

Chief of the Interior Ministry’s office in Khujand, the capital of Sughd province, Colonel Emin Jalilov has said that 685 crimes have been reported in the city over the first seven months of this year.

 Of this number, 643 women wearing hijab are now registered with Interior Ministry’s office in Khujand; 513 of them are residents of the city of Khujand.

Bishkek, August 11 / Kabar /. Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan are among the Central Asian countries that have the least access to safe drinking water per capita, First Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of Kyrgyzstan Dinara Kemelova said speaking at the high-level International Symposium on the sixth objective of Sustainable Development Goals in Dushanbe from 9 to 10 August this year.

Bishkek, August 15 / Kabar /. Kyrgyz President Almazbek Atambaev received Mufti of the Muslims of Kyrgyzstan Maksat aji Toktomushev, chairman of the Board of experts of the Spiritual Administration of Muslims of Kyrgyzstan Abdyshukur aji Narmatov, Council of experts Chubak aji Jalilov, member, chairman of the Board of the Development Fund of Spiritual Culture "Iyman" Nurzhigit Kadyrbekov, the Kyrgyz President's press office reports.

DUSHANBE, May 20, 2016, Asia-Plus – EurasiaNet.org reports deputies in Kyrgyzstan’s parliament have proposed legislation that would ban foreigners from setting up media outlets and restrict the proportion of non-local funding for news organizations to 20 percent.

The authors of the bill — a group of MPs led by Kojobek Ryspayev and Iskender Matraimov, both of the ruling Social Democratic Party (SDPK) — say the legislation is aimed at bolstering what they term “information security.”

DUSHANBE, July 14, 2016, Asia-Plus -- An article “Kyrgyzstan: Shock Billboard Sparks Religious Debate” that was posted on EurasiaNet.org’s website on July 13 says residents of Kyrgyzstan’s capital woke up on July 13 to find stark and, to some, provocative billboards on some of the city’s main thoroughfares.

The huge poster reportedly shows three groups of women in a variety of female head covers — some of them in the niqab veil that covers almost the entire — and the words “Oh poor nation, where are we headed?”

From behind two heavy metal doors, Nika, a gay man who recently set up a small LGBT support group in Kyrgyzstan’s capital, gingerly opens the door. “This is how we live now,” he says.

The European Parliament is keeping a worried eye on two Central Asian nations’ proposals to adopt Russian-style anti-“gay propaganda” laws.

The Russian law, enacted in 2013, provides for fines of up to 200,000 rubles (about US $3,000) for “propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations” that appears where the message could reach minors, including online. The law targets what it calls the “distorted understanding” that gay relations and heterosexual relations are “socially equivalent.”

Times are tough for members of the LGBT community in the former Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan.

Lesbian, gay and transgender people say they're feeling the impact of a proposed law preventing discussion of LGBT issues in the Central Asian nation that is closely allied with Russia. Gay people in Kyrgyzstan say the legislation has led to an increase in homophobia and hate crimes against their community.

Since Human Rights Watch’s September 2015 submission ahead of Tajikistan’s next Universal Periodic Review, the Tajik government has continued arresting, imprisoning, and torturing members of the country’s peaceful political opposition and targeting perceived critics abroad, seeking their detention and extradition back to Tajikistan. It has also forcibly disappeared critics abroad only to have them reappear in Tajik custody.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, it left behind an independent Tajikistan that was saddled with severe economic and social challenges that have lasted to this day. In particular, the government has always had an uneasy relationship with its Islamic roots, and it has made several attempts to diminish religion’s role in daily life.