EU - Uzbekistan Human Rights Dialogue

This memorandum provides an overview of Human Rights Watch’s main concerns with respect to the human rights situation in Uzbekistan, submitted to the European Union External Action Service in advance of the EU-Uzbekistan Human Rights Dialogue to be held on November 18, 2014. For additional information, please see Human Rights Watch Country page on Uzbekistan: https://www.hrw.org/europecentral-asia/uzbekistan.

Imprisonment of Human Rights Defenders, Journalists and Other Peaceful Critics on Politically-Motivated Charges and Other Forms of Repression of Civil Society Activism

The Uzbek government has imprisoned thousands on politically motivated charges to enforce its repressive rule, targeting human rights and opposition activists, journalists, religious believers, artists, and other perceived critics. Authorities also regularly persecute and harass rights defenders and civil society activists and block international rights groups and media outlets from operating in Uzbekistan.

Among those imprisoned for no other reason than the peaceful exercise of their right to freedom of expression are fourteen human rights activists: Azam Farmonov, Mehriniso Hamdamova, Zulhumor Hamdamova, Isroiljon Kholdorov, Gaybullo Jalilov, Nuriddin Jumaniyazov, Matluba Kamilova, Ganikhon Mamatkhanov, Chuyan Mamatkulov, Zafarjon Rahimov, Yuldash Rasulov, Bobomurod Razzokov, Fahriddin Tillaev, and Akzam Turgunov. Five are journalists: Solijon Abdurakhmanov, Muhammad Bekjanov, Gayrat Mikhliboev, Yusuf Ruzimuradov, and Dilmurod Saidov. Four are peaceful political opposition activists: Murod Juraev, Samandar Kukanov, Kudratbek Rasulov, and Rustam Usmanov. Three are independent religious figures: Ruhiddin Fahriddinov, Hayrullo Hamidov, and Akram Yuldashev. Seven others are perceived critics of the government or witnesses to the May 13, 2005 Andijan massacre, when Uzbek government forces shot and killed hundreds of mainly peaceful protesters: Dilorom Abdukodirova, Botirbek Eshkuziev, Bahrom Ibragimov, Davron Kabilov, Erkin Musaev, Davron Tojiev, and Ravshanbek Vafoev. Many are in serious ill-health, have been tortured, and had their sentences arbitrarily extended in prison.

The journalist Jamshid Karimov was reported to have been released in 2011 from a psychiatric ward where he was forcibly confined, but his whereabouts since then remains unknown, prompting fears that he is the victim of an enforced disappearance.

The Uzbek government has also imprisoned thousands of Muslims and other religious believers who practice their faith outside state controls or who belong to unregistered religious organizations on overly broad and vague charges of so-called “religious extremism,” “attempts to overthrow the constitutional order,” and possession of “illegal religious literature.”

Over the last year, Human Rights Watch has also received credible reports that a number of peaceful ethnic Karakalpak activists who have organized discussions regarding socio-economic issues, corruption, environmental problems such as the Aral Sea disaster, the denial of civil and political rights, and ethnic discrimination have been arbitrarily detained and imprisoned by Uzbek authorities. Karakalpakstan is an autonomous republic in the northwest of Uzbekistan. Several Karakalpak activists have been harassed by Uzbek authorities, threatened with imprisonment, and forced to flee Uzbekistan.

Case examples/updates from 2014:

In January 2014, police detained and fined independent photographer Umida Akhmedova, her son, and 5 others for holding a peaceful demonstration in support of Ukraine’s “Euromaidan” near the Ukrainian embassy in Tashkent. Akhmedova and her son were released one day later; at least 3 others were sentenced to 15 days administrative detention.
In March 2014, following investigations that lacked due process protections, a Tashkent court sentenced Fahriddin Tillaev and Nuriddin Jumaniyazov, both advocates for the rights of labor migrants, to more than eight years in prison on fabricated human trafficking charges.
The same month authorities arbitrarily extended for an unspecified number of years the sentence of imprisoned rights activist Ganikhon Mamatkhanov, who had been serving a 5 year sentence on politically motivated fraud charges.
In June 2014, rights activist Abdurasul Khudoynazarov died only 26 days after being released from prison, after he had served more than eight years of a nine-year sentence on trumped up charges. Officials released him the same day that prison doctors diagnosed him with advanced liver cancer. He told rights groups before his death that officials consistently denied his requests for medical treatment since his imprisonment in 2006.
Also in June, a Tashkent court convicted independent journalist Said Abdurakhimov, who writes under the pseudonym “Sid Yanyshev” for FerganaNews, a site banned in Uzbekistan, on charges of “threaten[ing] public security,” among others. The court fined Abdurakhimov 100 times the minimum wage (approximately $3,200) and confiscated his video camera.
In September 2014, authorities introduced amendments imposing new restrictions on bloggers, including a ban on “untrue posts and re-posts.” Dunja Mijatovic, the OSCE representative on freedom of the media, warned that the measures would further undermine free expression in Uzbekistan.
On September 20, 2014, Uzbek authorities prevented Feruza Khurramova, the wife of exiled peaceful opposition activist Bahodir Choriev, and her son, Dadahon Choriev, from entering the country after the two had flown to Tashkent from the United States. The two are Uzbek citizens who reside in the United States. After being detained for several hours authorities notified Khurramova that she and her son had been “stripped of their Uzbek citizenship” and would not be allowed in the country. Airport authorities deported them the next day to Turkey. On October 1, the Uzbek embassy in Washington, DC informed Burhon Choriev, the brother of Bahodir Choriev, and his wife Shahlo Nazarova, that they had also been stripped of their Uzbek citizenship. An embassy employee issued him and his wife a certificate stating that his citizenship had been annulled by a non-public order No. PF-4618, issued by President Karimov on April 28, 2014. The issuance of the order came a few days after Choriev organized an opposition party congress in the US. The circumstances surrounding these actions raise concerns that the Uzbek government is retaliating against peaceful political opponents by blocking them from returning to their own country and depriving them of citizenship.

Criminal Justice, Torture, and Ill-Treatment

International expert bodies, including the UN Committee against Torture (CAT) in November 2013, have continued to find that torture remains “systematic, encouraged, and unpunished” in Uzbekistan’s criminal justice system. Detainees’ rights are violated at each stage of investigations and trials, despite habeas corpus amendments passed in 2008. The government has failed to meaningfully implement recommendations to combat torture made by the CAT in 2013 and 2007, the UN special rapporteur in 2003, and other international bodies. Human Rights Watch continues to receive regular, credible reports of torture, including suspicious deaths in custody (see below under “Freedom of Religion” for details on one such case), in pretrial and post-conviction detention.

Suspects are not permitted access to lawyers, a critical safeguard against torture in pretrial detention. Police coerce confessions from detainees using torture, including beatings with truncheons and plastic bottles filled with water, hanging by the wrists and ankles, rape, and sexual humiliation. Authorities routinely refuse to investigate allegations of abuse.

Case examples from 2014:

A lawyer for imprisoned activists Nuriddin Jumaniyazov and Fahriddin Tillaev told Human Rights Watch that in January 2014 authorities stuck needles between Tillaev’s fingers and toes during an interrogation to force a false confession to trumped up human trafficking charges.
On June 9, 2014, Mirsobir Khamidkariev, a producer and businessman from Uzbekistan, was reportedly abducted by officers of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) from a street in central Moscow, Russian Federation, and forcibly returned to Uzbekistan the following day. He was held incommunicado in a basement in an unidentified location in Moscow for a day, forced to wear a bag over his head, and subjected to repeated beatings. He was then handed over to Uzbek law enforcement officers at an airport in Moscow. According to Amnesty International, Mirsobir Khamidkariev’s wife and his lawyer in Moscow were unable to establish contact with him and did not know his whereabouts until he re-appeared in the basement of a detention facility run by the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) in Tashkent two weeks later. His Russian lawyer, who was able to get access to him in Tashkent on October 31, told Amnesty International that upon his return to Tashkent Mirsobir Khamidkariev was subjected to torture and ill-treatment by law enforcement officers for two months to force him to confess to fabricated charges. He was tied to a bar attached to the wall with his head facing down and beaten repeatedly. Officers knocked out seven of his teeth and broke two of his ribs. Authorities have accused Khamidkariev of creating a “banned religious extremist organization,” Islam Jihodchilari, a charge he has strongly denied. According to his Russian lawyer, the charges against Mirsobir Khamidkariev refer to a conversation he had had with acquaintances at an informal gathering in Tashkent during which he allegedly expressed concern about the oppression of Islam and stated his support for women wearing headscarves. Court hearings have been postponed several times and the next one is scheduled for 13 November.
In July 2014, the wife of imprisoned rights activist Chuyan Mamatkulov told Human Rights Watch that on April 20, 2014 a prison captain named Sherali had repeatedly struck Mamatkulov on the head with a rubber truncheon in his office after Mamatkulov had asked to see a dentist. Following the beating prison authorities placed him in solitary confinement for 24 hours.

Freedom of Religion

Although Uzbekistan’s Constitution ensures freedom of religion, authorities continued their multi-year campaign of arbitrary detention, arrest, and torture of Muslims who practice their faith outside state controls. In July 2014, the Initiative Group of Independent Human Rights Defenders (IGIHRD), an Uzbek human rights group, estimated that there were 12,000 persons imprisoned on vague and overbroad charges related to “religious extremism,” with over two hundred convicted in 2014 alone.

In October 2014, Forum 18 and the Association for Human Rights in Central Asia reported the death in custody at a women’s prison outside Tashkent of 37-year-old Nilufar Rahimjonova. Rahimjonova had been serving a ten-year sentence on “terrorism,” and “espionage” charges that appeared to be fabricated in retaliation for her affiliation with her father, a well-respected theologian Domullo Marufdjon Istaravshani based in Iran, and her husband Yunus Abbasovich Burkhanov, also known as Saiyidyunus Istaravshani, based in Iran, who are openly opposed to President Karimov’s government. After her arrest in 2011, Rahimjonova was forced to give an incriminating TV interview against her family and was promptly sentenced to 10-years in prison following a flawed trial and allegations of ill-treatment and lack of access to counsel. Rahimjonova was not known to have suffered any chronic illnesses or ailments prior to her death on September 13, 2014. The cause of Rahimjonova's death remains unknown. Her body was handed to her Tashkent-based brother, who was reportedly told to bury it quickly in Uzbekistan without conducting a post-mortem examination. Human rights activists fear that Rahimjonova might have died of neglect or torture.

Continuing a trend that began in 2008, followers of the late Turkish Muslim theologian Said Nursi were prosecuted for religious extremism, with dozens arrested or imprisoned in 2013-2014.

Authorities also imprison and fine Christians who conduct peaceful religious activities for administrative offenses, such as illegal religious teaching.

Authorities extend sentences of religious and political prisoners for alleged violations of prison regulations. Such extensions occur without due process and add years to a prisoner’s sentence and appear aimed at keeping politically-sensitive prisoners incarcerated indefinitely.

Forced Labor

Forced child and adult labor in the cotton sector remains a serious concern. The government took no meaningful steps to implement the two International Labour Organization (ILO) conventions on child labor, which it ratified in March 2008. After years of refusing the ILO access to monitor the harvest, Tashkent agreed to a limited monitoring mission in 2013. However, it insisted that the mission’s mandate be limited to child labor and that monitoring teams include Uzbek officials, raising serious concerns about the mission’s ability to credibly investigate abuses and to ensure the safety of those being interviewed.

Despite lower numbers of younger children mobilized during the 2013 and 2014 harvests, the government continues to force millions of schoolchildren, mainly aged fifteen to seventeen, but some as young as nine, to help with the cotton harvest for up to two months a year. Officials including police, municipal authorities, and school principals shut down schools, busing children to cotton fields where they are made to harvest cotton in line with established daily quotas. They live in filthy conditions, contract illnesses, miss school, and work daily from early morning until evening for little or no pay. In 2014, as in past years, authorities also forced adults, including schoolteachers, doctors, and other public sector employees, to participate in the cotton harvest. Authorities regularly harass activists who try to document forced adult and child labor.

While finding that child labor was not “systematic,” the ILO’s 2013 monitoring mission report noted the use of child labor, emphasized concerns about the use of forced labor for the cotton harvest, and recommended that the government take action to implement ILO Convention No. 105. Uzbek civil society groups, including the Uzbek-German Forum for Human Rights, reported that the ILO’s monitoring mission was not able to undertake a comprehensive assessment of the use of forced labor in Uzbekistan’s cotton sector for a number of reasons, including the following:

The monitoring teams all included Uzbek government representatives or representatives of quasi-governmental or government-controlled organizations whose independence and impartiality were far from guaranteed. According to the ILO report, the local Coordination Council, which was composed entirely of representatives of government agencies, appointed 40 Uzbek local monitors from the Ministry of Labor and Social Protection, the Trade Union Federation including the Women’s committees, the Chamber of Commerce and Industries, and the Farmers’ Association, all of which are government agencies or government-controlled.
There is a deeply rooted, and well founded fear of government and government officials in Uzbekistan. People interviewed by the monitoring teams may not have felt secure in communicating information that implicate the government in violations out of fear of repercussions. The ILO’s report is silent on whether it recognized this as a possibility and attempted to take any steps to assure respondents or ameliorate issues related to the possibility of bias. The ILO’s mission was also weakened by efforts of the Uzbek government to undermine monitoring. Human rights monitors in various regions of Uzbekistan reported to the Uzbek-German Forum of Human Rights, the Cotton Campaign, and publicly that such tactics included transferring students, in particular first-year students, back and forth between their classrooms and the cotton fields to evade discovery by ILO monitors and instructing people to lie to monitors.
The mission’s scope did not include the use of forced adult labor, nor were monitors present during any pre-harvest stages of work such as preparing the fields, planting, and weeding the cotton.
The ILO did not ensure the participation of the International Trade Union Confederation, the International Organization of Employers, and Uzbek civil society.

The Andijan Massacre

More than nine years on, the government continues to refuse an independent investigation into the 2005 massacre of hundreds of people in Andijan who had gathered to protest socio-economic problems and civil and political grievances in the country in connection with the government’s prosecution of local business leaders on charges of extremism and membership in an illegal religious organization. The Uzbek government’s persistent refusal to allow an independent international investigation has denied justice to victims and failed to bring to account those responsible. Over two hundred individuals continue to serve sentences related to the Andijan events following closed trials that were marred by serious due process violations and indications that torture may have been used to procure confessions. Authorities continue to persecute anyone suspected of having participated in, witnessed, or even spoken critically about the atrocities.

Forced Sterilization

In 2014, Human Rights Watch interviewed gynecologists from Uzbekistan who reported that the Ministry of Health orders some doctors to perform a certain number of forced sterilizations each month. Some women who have given birth to two or more children have been targeted for involuntary sterilization, especially in rural areas. Gynecologists confirmed that surgical sterilizations are performed without women’s informed consent and in unsafe medical facilities.

Human Rights Watch November 2014 Visit to Uzbekistan

In March 2011, the Uzbek government forced Human Rights Watch to close its Tashkent office, and on June 9 the same year, the Supreme Court of Uzbekistan granted the Ministry of Justice's petition to liquidate Human Rights Watch’s Tashkent office registration in a hearing that violated due process standards. The legal ruling followed years of Uzbek government obstruction of Human Rights Watch's access to the country, including through denial of visas and accreditation to every Human Rights Watch staff member since 2004.

In September 2014, Human Rights Watch applied for visas to visit Uzbekistan both to meet with the government and with representatives of civil society, to present and discuss the findings and recommendations of our September 2014 report “Until the Very End: Politically-Motivated Imprisonment in Uzbekistan.” While the government granted a visa to the director of the Europe and Central Asia division for a high-level visit (which took place November 2-9, 2014), it denied one to Human Rights Watch’s researcher. During his visit to Tashkent, the Europe and Central Asia director directly appealed to the Uzbek Foreign Ministry to allow Human Rights Watch to resume its work inside the country, including by issuing a visa to Human Rights Watch’s researcher on Uzbekistan. Uzbek government representatives declined to discuss with Human Rights Watch our findings or recommendations on political prisoners or other human rights issues, although they did provide written comments on our report. Human Rights Watch plans to continue to actively pursue the possibility of carrying our research and advocacy work in Uzbekistan.

While in Tashkent the Europe and Central Asia director was able to meet with several human rights activists and family members of some of the political prisoners profiled in the new report, and had useful meetings with diplomats and representatives of international organizations.

Recommendations for steps the Uzbek government should be urged to take:

Immediately and unconditionally release all wrongfully imprisoned human rights defenders, journalists, members of the political opposition, religious believers, and others held on politically motivated charges;
End the crackdown on civil society and allow domestic and international human rights organizations to operate without government interference, including by promptly re-registering those that have been liquidated or otherwise forced to cease operating in Uzbekistan, and issuing visas and accreditation for staff of international nongovernmental organizations, including Human Rights Watch;
Allow unhindered access for independent monitors, including the eleven UN monitors who have been unable to visit due to the government’s refusal to issue the required invitations, and implement recommendations by independent monitoring bodies, including UN treaty bodies and special procedures;
Take meaningful measures to end torture and ill-treatment and the accompanying culture of impunity, including by implementing in full the recommendations made by the United Nations Special Rapporteur on torture, the Committee Against Torture, and the Human Rights Committee;
Conduct credible investigations into all allegations of torture, including those outlined in this briefing, hold to account those found responsible and make public the results of the investigations;
Ensure genuine media freedom, ease harassment of journalists, and allow domestic and international media outlets, including those that have been forced to stop operating in Uzbekistan, to register and grant accreditation to foreign journalists;
End forced and child labor in the cotton sector, allow truly independent monitoring, and involve independent nongovernmental organizations in assessments of child welfare, particularly as they relate to the cotton sector;
End religious persecution, including by decriminalizing peaceful religious activity and ending the imprisonment of thousands of people for their nonviolent religious expression.

We urge the EU to make publicly available the specific concerns raised during the dialogue, and any concrete commitments secured from the Uzbek government to address those concerns.