| Soltan Achilova | |
| Birth Date: | c. 1950 |
| Known For: | reporting on abuses to human rights |
| Occupation: | photographer and journalist |
| Nationality: | Turkmenistan |
Gurban Soltan Achilova or Soltan Açylowa or Gurbansoltan Achilova (born c. 1949) is a Turkmenistani photojournalist. She was a nominee for the Martin Ennals Award for Human Rights Defenders in 2021. She has been reported as the only openly critical journalist in Turkmenistan. Her country is described as an information black hole that is only surpassed by North Korea.
Achilova was born in 1948,[1] 1949[2] or 1950. By 1979 she and her husband had four children and the family lived in a house they owned in Ashgabat, the capital of Turkmenistan. She was not a journalist and might never have come to notice if not for an event in March 2006.
While Achilova was out of her house one day and her daughter was at home, workers arrived, without notice, to demolish her family's home. The police assisted in the family's eviction and the authorities offered no compensation for their loss. She contacted the courts and the chief prosecutor's office, but all she found were similar cases of injustice. She became a journalist, using her camera to document her findings. She has no access at home to the internet and her country is described as an "information black hole", only surpassed in this respect by North Korea.[3]
In 2019 she was a contributor to the opposition website, Khronika Turkmenistana (hronikatm.com), which had been started in 2006.[4] She was prevented from leaving the country to go to a seminar in Georgia.[5] Enquiries by the Committee to Protect Journalists about why she had been prevented from travelling were not replied to.
Achilova has been reported as the only openly critical journalist in Turkmenistan. She operates a web site in a country where access to the internet is restricted. Despite this she has 30,000 visits to the site she uses each day (as of 2021). She reports on the human rights abuses in her country. She says that she has been hoping for improvement for thirty years but it does not get better. She says that people who campaign for human rights are watched and they are subject to not only arrest but pressure is also applied to members of their family.
She was shortlisted for the 2021 Martin Ennals Award for Human Rights Defenders together with Loujain al-Hathloul from Saudi Arabia and Yu Wensheng from China. That year's award was given to the lawyer Yu Wensheng who was serving a four-year sentence in China after deciding to defend other people's human rights. Achilova was the only one of the nominees who was able to address the ceremony as she sent a pre-recorded video.[6] Achilova had not been able to attend in person because of the COVID-19 pandemic restrictions and her runner-up award remained with them.[7]
Achilova was in the news again in November 2023 when she was prevented from attending that years Martin Ennals Award ceremony in Geneva. She was held by the authorities in Turkmenistan again as she and her daughter tried to leave on 17 November. She was questioned and strip searched twice but no charges were brought against her. She was still a critic of her country's government and she wanted to collect her award from 2021. The nominal reason given by the border staff for preventing her leaving the country was that their passports were invalid. Commentators concluded that they were trying to prevent her from further highlighting the country's injustices. She was expecting to meet people from the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and she had been invited to speak at the University of Geneva during their human rights week.[8]