Human Rights Developments

Defending Human Rights

The Role of the International Community

Authorities again refused to register independent rights organizations, the Human Rights Society of Uzbekistan (HRSU) and the Independent Human Rights Organization of Uzbekistan (IHROU). The Supreme Court failed to hear the appeals of rights defenders Mahbuba Kasymova and Ismail Adylov, members of IHROU, who were jailed over a year ago for their human rights activities. Adylov, who was released from the hospital with a chronic kidney ailment just one week before authorities took him into custody, was reported to be in poor physical condition. The human rights defender was missing in custody for over thirty days in early 2000 when officials transfered him to a distant prison facility without notifying his family, depriving them of the opportunity to give him needed food and medicine.

Over a year after police illegally detained and beat IHROU chairman Mikhail Ardzinov, law enforcement officials refused to return his passport to him and continued to deny him means of redress. His repeated complaints and requests that a case be opened against his abusers was finally referred not to the state prosecutor, but to the police station that houses the officers who detained and beat him in 1999.

The head of the HRSU, Tolib Iakubov, also reported that there were no known results from the Polish government's investigation of a 1998 attack on him in Warsaw during the OSCE's annual implementation meeting. The men who beat Iakubov in broad daylight, sending him to the hospital with severe injuries, have not been brought to justice.

Human rights activists in regions outside the capital reported being subjected to police interrogation, threats, and extortion, as were victims of human rights abuse with whom they spoke. In one instance, the Akhmedov family of Andijan in the Ferghana Valley was threatened after meeting with Human Rights Watch and police forcibly confiscated a copy of the Human Rights Watch World Report 2000. Copies of the report were also confiscated by police from a Human Rights Watch representative outside a Syrdarya courthouse.

The activities of local and international rights defenders were seriously limited by authorities' arbitrary denial of access to nominally open judicial hearings.