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I vividly remember the day I first met Mohira, three years ago. She had been waiting patiently for several hours to speak with me at the home of a human rights activist in a neighborhood on the outer reaches of Tashkent, Uzbekistan’s capital. I was there to interview relatives of the victims of police torture - a phenomenon that United Nations bodies have determined is “systematic” and “widespread” in that Central Asian nation.

Our meeting might have never happened. On the morning of the day we were to meet agents from Uzbekistan’s notorious security services – known by their acronym, the “SNB” – called the human rights activist just before I was to arrive, threatening consequences if a meeting was arranged with Human Rights Watch. When the activist called to say I shouldn’t come over, I understood immediately what had happened.

A few days later we tried again. We took extra precautions, avoiding all phone communication. I took three taxis to the activist’s house to avoid being followed. By the time I got there, eight families were waiting to tell their stories. Mohira was second to last.

Soft-spoken, but with a steady voice, Mohira recounted the horror her family had endured, Her husband, Kayum, a security guard for the British embassy from 2004 until 2008, was arrested on false charges and accused of spying for the British government. The SNB held him in a jail cell for nine months, subjecting him to gruesome torture.

The British government stayed largely silent during the ordeal, she told me, as it deepened its military cooperation with Uzbekistan’s authoritarian president, Islam Karimov, because of the country’s geo-strategic importance as a transit route to Afghanistan. While Mohira’s husband was brutally beaten and rotted in SNB custody, she said, no British diplomats even tried to visit him.

What made meeting Mohira and the other seven families unusual, however, wasn’t the brutal treatment they described. It was their courage to speak out, fully aware that the SNB could have been – and probably was — listening to our every word. What Mohira and the others did was far from common in a country that in 2005 witnessed a brutal massacre in which government forces killed hundreds of mainly unarmed protesters. It was a courage rarely seen in a society where all forms of dissent are immediately crushed and dozens of civil society activists who did dare to speak out languish behind bars.

Indeed, it was Mohira’s determination to speak out — the impulse that sits deep inside every human rights defender - that made all the difference, and led to her husband’s release the next year.

But the British government, along with the United States and the European Union, has continued to sit largely silent as an atrocious situation in Uzbekistan gets worse. Rather than publicly discussing accountability, including potential sanctions, for Uzbek officials who engage in torture and other abuses, London has preferred to seek a conciliatory tone, raising human rights in quarterly reports to Parliament and in private with a president who has become only more defiant over the course of his 23 years in power.

Two months ago, the Uzbek government succeeded in interfering with the work of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to the extent that it felt compelled to terminate its visits to prisons. The director-general of the ICRC said visits under Uzbek government terms would be “pointless” and so the government has prevented the last truly independent observer in the country from monitoring treatment of prisoners, lest they witness more torture.

London, Washington, Brussels, and other key actors could use a little more of the courage Mohira exhibited in their policies toward Uzbekistan. They should have the courage, like she did, to speak out publicly, and to articulate that absent demonstrable progress on issues such as ending torture Uzbek officials will have to face real policy consequences.

Mohira’s courage should inspire all of us to act. After all, if Mohira can come forward, why can’t we?

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