A/HRC/45/13/Add.1 Annex Report of the Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances on its visit to Tajikistan I. Introduction 1. A delegation of the Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances conducted an official visit to Tajikistan from 1 to 5 July 2019. The delegation was composed of the Chair of the Working Group, Bernard Duhaime, and a member of the Working Group, Henrikas Mickevičius. 2. The Working Group wishes to thank the Government of Tajikistan for extending an invitation to visit the country, and for the efforts made before and during the visit to facilitate its smooth undertaking, including granting most of the meetings requested. 3. The Working Group also wishes to thank the Regional Office for Central Asia of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights for its continuous support during the visit. 4. The Working Group visited Dushanbe and Vahdat. It regrets that its requests to visit other regions were not accommodated. The Working Group met with, inter alia, the Minister of Justice, representatives of the Presidential Office, the Office of the Prosecutor General, the State Committee for National Security, the Medical Forensic Centre under the Ministry of Health and Social Protection, the Ministry of Defence, the Supreme Court, the Ministry of the Interior and the Ombudsman’s Office. It also visited the pretrial detention centres of the Ministry of Justice and the State Committee for National Security in Dushanbe and prisons in Dushanbe and Vahdat. The Working Group regrets that it was not granted a meeting with representatives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs at the beginning of the visit and a debriefing at the end, which is the usual practice during its official visits. 5. The Working Group also met with relatives of disappeared persons, representatives of civil society, including non-governmental organizations, human rights defenders and lawyers. It wishes to thank all the stakeholders it met and commends the civil society interlocutors and family members on their courage in pursuing those cases in difficult circumstances. 6. The present report includes reference to developments that occurred between July 2019, when the visit was conducted, and the time the report was drafted in May 2020. The Working Group thanks the Government for its extensive reply to the report, received on 10 July 2020. The Working Group welcomes the fact that several of the recommendations contained in the report are acceptable to the Government and hopes that the dialogue can continue with a view to implementing all the recommendations contained in section VII of the present report. II. Background 7. The recent history of Tajikistan has been extensively shaped by the civil war that began shortly after Tajikistan gained independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. The war, which lasted from 1992 to 1997, devastated the country, killing an estimated 50,000 to 100,000 people from a population of 5.1 million, and displacing about one tenth of the population. During the conflict, the Government, supported by pro-government paramilitary organizations, fought the United Tajik Opposition, an alliance of several different forces, including liberal reformers and the Islamic Renaissance Party. Both sides in the conflict conscripted young men to fight and committed violations of international human rights and humanitarian law. Much of the fighting occurred in the south, particularly in the Khatlon region, whereas many soldiers were conscripted from the northern regions, particularly Khujand. United Nations sponsored peace negotiations began in 1994, leading to the signature of the General Agreement on the Establishment of Peace and National Accord in Tajikistan in 1997. The peace agreement included provision for a 30 per cent quota of opposition representatives in the Government. 3