Amnesty International collected more than 405,000 signatures under a petition demanding to drop charges against Kyrgyz human rights activist Rita Karasartova.
The website of the organization says that Rita Karasartova was charged with «far-fetched accusations of attempted violent overthrow of government.» For this she faces up to 15 years in prison. And the number of signatures collected in support of the human rights activist is evidence of the global support and solidarity with her and other activists, journalists and human rights defenders in Kyrgyzstan.
«We expect that the large-scale support, expressed in hundreds of thousands of signatures and letters, will show the government that the persecution of critics of the authorities in the country does not go unnoticed and will prompt the authorities to change their policies. The authorities should take into account the international attention to the so-called Kempir-Abad case and all politically motivated cases in the Kyrgyz Republic,» Maisy Weicherding, Amnesty International’s Central Asia Researcher, said.
National sections and structures of Amnesty International around the world have already handed over the collected signatures to the authorities of Kyrgyzstan. AI employees took more than 60,000 signatures to the Embassy of Kyrgyzstan in the UK.
