“Each week, a young man who sells shoes at a market in southern Kyrgyzstan loses a day of work to travel to the open prison where he is serving a three-year sentence. But the crime for which he was convicted, possession of “extremist” material, no longer exists.

When Kyrgyzstan overhauled its criminal code in January 2019, it decriminalized the possession of videos, pamphlets, songs, and other material the authorities label extremist. The charge had been widely used to imprison people for nonviolent behavior, such as practicing fundamentalist interpretations of Islam, or for even more innocuous legitimate activities. Since then, possession of such material can be treated as a crime only if the accused disseminated it or showed an intent to do so …”