If you are in danger right now
Asylum on gender-based grounds
The current Home Office guidance is “Gender issues in the asylum claim”, version 3, 2018.
A female interviewer and a female interpreter
You have the right to ask, but you need to ask in advance and in writing: the guidance requires every effort to be made for a request made before the interview. A request made on the day of the interview is usually not granted.
Children
A parent should not be expected to describe persecution in front of their children. Single mothers should be given interviews during school hours; if there's nobody to leave the child with, the interview should be rescheduled.
There is no country information
There are no CPINs at all for Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan or Turkmenistan. For Uzbekistan there is one note — on sexual orientation and gender identity. None of the five countries has a CPIN on women and domestic abuse. This means the country information for the case is brought by the applicant herself and her representative.
Why this matters
“That doesn't happen in your country” — but it does
The Home Office writes country policy notes — documents about what is happening in a particular country. For Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan there are no such notes at all. For Uzbekistan there is one — on sexual orientation and gender identity. There is nothing on women and domestic abuse for any of our five countries.
This doesn't mean the problem doesn't exist. It means the caseworker who reads your file may have no material on it at all — and it's the person handling your case who brings it.
What is publicly known and can be checked in open sources:
On 9 November 2023, Saltanat Nukenova was killed in Kazakhstan. She was murdered by her husband, Kuandyk Bishimbayev, a former Minister of National Economy. On 13 May 2024 the court sentenced him to 24 years in prison under Article 99 part 2 point 5 (murder with particular cruelty) and Article 110 part 2 (torture) of the Criminal Code of Kazakhstan. The whole country watched the trial.
Before this case, battery in Kazakhstan was an administrative offence: until 2024, nobody went to prison for it. On 15 April 2024 the president signed a law that put battery and minor bodily harm back into the Criminal Code. In the country it's known as “Saltanat's law”.
In other words, the law changed only after a woman was killed in a way the country couldn't stay silent about. Everything that happened to other women before that happened under a law that didn't punish battery.
We don't assess your case and don't advise you on what to say — only an IAA-registered adviser or an SRA lawyer can do that. But these are facts available in open sources, and the specialist handling your case should know about them. If they haven't heard of them, tell them.