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Appendix I. A Note on the Case of Andrei Shelkovenko

Throughout the past three years the Uzbek government has repeatedly used Human Rights Watch’s initially inaccurate reporting on the 2004 death in custody of Andrei Shelkovenko to support claims that our reporting is biased—intended to undermine Uzbekistan’s international reputation and to sabotage its relationships with other governments—and to more generally to dismiss allegations of torture in Uzbekistan put forward by nongovernmental organizations.

On May 19, 2004 Shelkovenko, a murder suspect, died in police custody; officials who returned his body to the family said that he had hanged himself. Concerned by marks we saw on the corpse, law enforcement threats to the family that they bury Shelkovenko’s body immediately—without obtaining an independent autopsy—by the threats the family faced when trying to find a morgue to preserve the body for an independent investigation, and by allegations by Shelkovenko’s mother and sister that he had been abused in custody, Human Rights Watch issued a press release expressing concern that Shelkovenko had died as a result of torture and calling on the government to allow an independent investigation into his death.

Subsequently, in a positive move, the government allowed an independent forensic team, following an agreement with the US nongovernmental organization Freedom House, to observe a second autopsy of Shelkovenko’s corpse. The forensic pathologist who observed the second autopsy “confirmed the results of the first autopsy and demonstrated findings compatible with hanging,” and stated that there were no significant injuries at the time of the second autopsy.¹⁷⁸ An independent criminal justice expert confirmed this and also stated that there were “no indications that Mr. Shelkovenko was hanged by another.”¹⁷⁹

As soon as the forensic team publicized its findings Human Rights Watch publicly acknowledged, through a press release that was posted permanently to our website, our error in attributing the cause of Shelkovenko’s death to torture. We attributed the error to erroneous conclusions we made based on wounds observed on Shelkovenko’s body, which in fact had been caused by postmortem drying, a natural process. We remained concerned, however, about the threats to his family and about the possibility that he had been ill-treated in custody in ways that may not have resulted in bodily injuries.

Following this incident, the government incorrectly alleged that the Human Rights Watch representative had been “moving bodies around Tashkent,” when in fact she had accompanied Shelkovenko’s family to several morgues in an attempt to find one that would properly store it so that eventually an independent autopsy could be performed.

The fact that the Uzbek government agreed to an independent investigation into the cause of Shelkovenko’s death shows that when the political will is present such investigations can go forward. Such independent investigations have not become a regular practice in Uzbekistan.

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