General Affairs Council
European Union
Rue de la Loi, 175
B – 1048 Brussels
Belgium

Dear Ministers,

We write in advance of the upcoming E.U.-Uzbekistan Cooperation Committee and Council meetings in December and January respectively, to urge you to use these opportunities to seek concrete commitments from the Uzbek government to improve its appalling human rights record.

In the past year, the Uzbek government has been under pressure from the international community to improve its human rights record. It has responded by taking several halting positive steps—it extended a long-overdue invitation to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture to visit the country and registered, for the first time, an independent human rights organization. But in nearly all other respects, the Uzbek government continues to fall well below the human rights criteria set out in its Partnership and Cooperation Agreement (PCA) with the E.U.

The past year in particular has been marked by a series of serious setbacks to human rights. Through its Tashkent office, Human Rights Watch documented the deaths of five people arising from suspicious circumstances in custody. Religious persecution continues unabated; we gathered materials on the trials of 167 individuals on charges based on their religious practices and affiliations. The authorities have arrested seven human rights defenders, four of whom remain in custody, one in a locked-up ward of a psychiatric institution. All but one human rights group remain unregistered, as do opposition political parties. The government continues to harass and imprison individual opposition activists and censor the media.

Below we describe these setbacks in more detail, and suggest a list of concrete benchmarks for progress that we hope will inform your dialogue with the Uzbek leadership.

The PCA establishes respect for human rights as a cornerstone for the E.U.’s engagement with Uzbekistan. It is imperative that the E.U. make clear to its Uzbek counterparts that it expects significant improvements in human rights as part of this engagement. Continued dialogue without tangible progress could turn counterproductive and undermine efforts toward human rights and democracy in the country.

Torture and prison conditions
Torture and ill-treatment in Uzbek prisons and police precincts remain commonplace, with few agents held accountable. Since the January PCA meeting, we have documented five deaths arising from highly suspicious circumstances in custody, bringing the total number of such deaths documented by Human Rights Watch to twelve in the past eighteen months. Several brutal deaths in custody prompted a strong statement by the E.U. at the November 22 OSCE Permanent Council meeting. Among them were those of Muzafar Avazov and Husnidin Alimov, whose battered bodies were returned to their families for burial in Tashkent. Their deaths are illustrative of the horrific treatment suffered by many prisoners in Uzbekistan: Avazov’s body was covered with burns and his bruised hands had no fingernails.

The convictions in January and June of seven police officers and security agents for two deaths in custody are welcome developments, but have not translated into more systemic change towards increased accountability for abusive law enforcement officials. Many other deaths and countless reports of torture remain without remedy and no legal safeguards against torture have been introduced, despite persistent recommendations to that effect by international monitoring bodies, including the United Nations Committee against Torture. Uzbek courts, meanwhile, continue to accept as evidence confessions extracted under torture.

Prison conditions overall continue to be appalling. Mistreatment and torture, combined with a lack of basic food and medical care, caused widespread illness and deaths. In addition to the five deaths from treatment in custody mentioned above, local human rights groups documented at least sixteen deaths in custody in 2002, officially attributed to tuberculosis; the true number is believed to be far higher. This summer, Human Rights Watch received a letter that a prisoner serving time in a facility in Kashkadaria province managed to have smuggled out that listed, among many other descriptions of abuse, the sexual assaults of eighteen independent Muslim prisoners in that facility this year.

Religious persecution of independent Muslims
The government’s violent crackdown against independent Muslims continues unabated, with no sign of progress on the sorely-needed legal reforms that would improve the climate for religious freedom or provide protection from torture for those detained for their religious beliefs, practices, and affiliations. Thousands of people remain imprisoned for their peaceful religious activities and we continue to document new arrests and trials at an unrelenting pace. The international community generally greeted as progress an amnesty issued last year for certain religious prisoners. But among the hundreds arrested this year were people released under the amnesty, including Ibodat Sultanova and Merziot Usmanov, sentenced anew to seven and eight years of imprisonment, respectively. Others amnestied have been subjected to persistent police harassment, and required to report regularly to police and sign statements promising not to attend meetings or protests and rejecting their religious beliefs.

Crackdown on human rights defenders
The past year has also seen an intensified crackdown against human rights defenders in Uzbekistan. Since January, Human Rights Watch has documented the arrests of seven human rights activists, four of whom have been imprisoned for periods of up to seven years. Authorities have also detained, threatened, and harassed numerous other human rights activists during this period.

Among those arrested was Yuldash Rasulov, whose work for the Human Rights Society of Uzbekistan (HRSU) focused on the government’s crackdown against independent Muslims. Law enforcement agents kept him in incommunicado custody for one month before allowing any family members or others to visit him in detention. In September, following a politically motivated trial in which the court ignored evidence of torture, Rasulov was sentenced to seven years imprisonment. In another case, a court ordered human rights defender Elena Urlaeva to undergo forced psychiatric treatment in apparent retaliation for her human rights activities. The decision was executed on August 27, when Urlaeva was arrested and placed in a locked ward in the main psychiatric institution in Tashkent, where she has been subjected to forced medication and has been denied visits even from her family.

Registration of civil society groups
Not a single human rights group has been legalized since the March registration of the Independent Human Rights Organization of Uzbekistan (IHROU). The registration of this group was a development that we welcomed in a press release and in many conversations with the international community. Rather than turning this initial positive step into a more broad-ranging pattern, however, Uzbek authorities have refused any additional groups to register. IHROU remains to date the only registered independent national human rights organization in the country. In May and again in October, the long-pending application of another human rights group, the Human Rights Society of Uzbekistan “Ezgulik,” was turned down.

Freedom of expression and the media
Violations of press freedoms continue despite recently announced changes in censorship policy. In May, presumably in response to outside pressure, the government removed the head of the Committee for the Protection of State Secrets, and announced that newspapers no longer had to submit their copy for prepublication clearance. Authorities, however, simply transferred the role of censor to newspaper editors. While Uzbek newspapers have since run several articles that previously would not have been published, in at least one case the presidential administration has summoned the editor of a newspaper administration and pressured him to stop publishing such material.

Journalists in Uzbekistan also continue to risk arbitrary detention. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, at least three journalists are currently in prison for their professional work.

Political opposition parties
Political opposition groups remain unregistered, and face harassment and arbitrary detention for gathering informally or discussing political issues. While the Birlik (“Unity”) party has succeeded in holding a series of regional meetings without government interference, former and current Birlik members remain on police lists and have been required to report regularly to police and to sign statements explaining their current activities. In May, police prevented the Erk (“Freedom”) party from meeting by detaining its leader, Atanazar Oripov, and saying they would hold him until it was clear that the meeting would not take place. Citizens who have tried to organize protests on economic, social, and political issues have likewise been harassed, threatened, and detained.

The EBRD annual meeting
The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) has selected Tashkent as the site of its next annual meeting, to be held in May 2003. As you undoubtedly know, the EBRD is unique among international financial institutions in having a mandate that expressly includes the promotion of human rights and democracy. Its founding document specifies that it would engage those countries in the region that are committed to and apply the “fundamental principles of multiparty democracy, the rule of law, human rights and market economics.” Against this backdrop, it is surprising and unfortunate that the EBRD should have decided to accord the Uzbek government, among the most repressive in the region, the political prestige and financial benefits attached to hosting a high-level gathering of this kind. More than fifty non-governmental organizations joined Human Rights Watch in writing to the Bank’s president in May, expressing concern that should the meeting go ahead without concrete progress in human rights, it will be interpreted as an endorsement of the host government’s repressive policies.

The E.U. represents a majority among the Bank’s shareholders and is in a particularly suitable position to help ensure that the meeting serves to advance human rights and democracy in Uzbekistan. The Uzbek government needs to know what is expected from it before the meeting, and what consequences will ensue should these expectations not be met.

Benchmarks for progress
Following is a selective list of benchmarks that address some of the concerns identified above. We hope the E.U. will emphasize to its Uzbek counterparts that it expects to see these benchmarks met before the May 2003 annual meeting of the EBRD.

Introduction of judicial review of detention (habeas corpus): As one of the most important safeguards against torture, the E.U. should require that independent judicial review of detention within a reasonable time be introduced in the Uzbek criminal procedure code.

Genuine and sustained cooperation with international monitoring mechanisms: Several E.U. member states have welcomed ICRC access to Uzbek prisons as a sign of progress, and linked this move to E.U. pressure. Yet the ICRC has repeatedly suspended its prison visits due to continued lack of satisfactory arrangements with the Uzbek authorities. The E.U. should require that the Uzbek authorities genuinely cooperate with the ICRC and promptly meet its requirements so that visits to places of detention can resume without further delay. The E.U. should further make clear to the Uzbek authorities that it expects them to sustain the conditions necessary for ICRC criteria for such visits to be met.
The E.U.’s November 22 statement welcomed the invitation by the Uzbek government to the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture and emphasized the need for “practical follow-up, and implementation of measures to bring about real change in the treatment … in custody.” This is precisely the message that must be conveyed at the Cooperation Council meeting and during the lead-up to it. In its dialogue with the Uzbek authorities, the E.U. should also express its support for the work that the Special Rapporteur is undertaking in Uzbekistan, and in the run-up to the meeting, follow closely the Uzbek authorities’ degree of cooperation, including unfettered access necessary to investigate the August deaths at Jaslyk, with this important monitoring mechanism.

Decriminalization of Legitimate Religious Activities: As a first step toward improving the legal climate for religious freedom, the E.U. should ask the Uzbek authorities to reform article 5 of the Law on Freedom of Conscience and Religious Organizations, and its corresponding article 216-2 of the criminal code, with a view toward decriminalizing proselytism and other missionary activities.

The release of arbitrarily detained human rights defenders: The E.U. should raise concern about the government’s intensified pressure on human rights defenders, and require that arbitrarily detained human rights defenders, such as Yuldash Rasulov and Elena Urlaeva, be released immediately pending an independent review of any charges or court orders against them.

Registration of civil society groups: The E.U. should require the lifting of restrictions on the operation of civil society groups and push for the registration of key civil society organizations, such as the Human Rights Society of Uzbekistan, Ezgulik, Mazlum, and the Committee of Legal Assistance to Prisoners.

Thank you for your attention to our concerns. We hope that you will find these suggestions useful and wish you fruitful meetings.

Sincerely,