Watchdog

Officials from the European Union and Turkmenistan have held a second round of human rights talks in Brussels, RFE/RL's Turkmen Service reports.

Gabriela Dlouha, the director of Human Rights and Transition Policy at the Czech Foreign Ministry, told RFE/RL's Turkmen Service that discussions this week focused on the functioning of a civil society, press freedom, and freedom of expression, religion, movement, association, and assembly.

Other topics included prison conditions, torture, and judiciary reform.

Dlouha, who headed the Czech delegation, said the EU gave the Turkmen officials a list of specific cases -- including political prisoners -- that the bloc would like the Turkmen government to resolve.

The EU officials met with representatives from Turkmen and international NGOs before meeting the Turkmen government officials.

The next regular human-rights talks are due to take place next summer under the Spanish EU Presidency.

The Czech EU Presidency ended on June 30, and Sweden is now the EU president.

Swedish officials have indicated they will continue to press human rights issues with Turkmenistan during their presidency.

Activists from several Moldovan human rights groups have held a march in downtown Chisinau to protest police brutality which, they say, in many cases amounts to torture, RFE/RL's Moldovan Service reports.

Members of Amnesty International's Moldovan branch handed the Prosecutor-General's Office a petition with thousands of signatures calling for a thorough investigation of allegations of torture, especially after the contested elections on April 5 when hundreds of protesters were detained and many claimed to have been beaten by police.

A spokeswoman for the Prosecutor-General's Office told RFE/RL that in the last 10 weeks the office has received 70 complaints of postelection police brutality and six of them led to formal charges being made.

Vladimir Turcanu, a Communist Party member in charge of a government commission set up to look into election violence, told RFE/RL that police are "only human," and he claimed that in the April clashes 274 police were injured.

Moldovan human rights activists claim that some 600 people were detained by the police during the April protests, but the Interior Ministry says there were about 300.