Uzbek Laws Encourage Media Repression

Instead of offering protection, Uzbekistan’s legal system helps the authorities harass and persecute journalists who stray from the official line.

The trials of Abdumalik Boboev, a correspondent for Voice of America, and Vladimir Berezovsky, editor of the web-portal vesti.uz are cases in point. (See Voice of America Reporter Charged in Uzbekistan and Uzbek Reporter Given “Parody of Trial” for more on the Boboev case, and Reporter in Libel Trial in Uzbekistan on Berezovsky.)

The manner in which these prosecutions can best be compared with the Spanish Inquisition.

The cases agenst both men are founded on highly questionable reports produced by the State Centre for Media Monitoring and Information Support, which goes by the acronym UzASI. The agency implements all-embracing restrictions on media output issued by the Uzbek government in 2007.

President Islam Karimov’s 2002 decree ending to official censorship was widely welcomed, but the result was the opposite of what one might have expected. Since responsibility for content now lay squarely with press and broadcast outlets, they became even more cautious about what they allowed to go out.

In more developed countries, there are media rights organisations with the means to take up legal cases involving free speech issues. Journalists in Uzbekistan have no such recourse, and cannot afford the high cost of mounting a legal defence.

Editors and reporters have only to look at the few trials that have taken place since censorship officially ended in order to conclude that it is best to avoid anything remotely controversial. Their political masters have pressed home the message that a lawsuit is potentially ruinous. As a result, even an article pointing out deficiencies in municipal service provision becomes off-limits.

Another quiet change is that readers’ letters asking newpaper reporters to investigate some matter are passed to the police.

In such a landscape, officials and businessmen can rest easy in the knowledge they will never be subjected to scrutiny. The sole remaining area of openness is in foreign media, through their contact with the few remaining independent journalists.

This is where the State Centre for Media Monitoring comes in. Its job is to track material published abroad as well as inside Uzbekistan, and write the reports that provide the basis for retribution.

Once prosecutions take place, the law effectively bans all forms of reporting on the case. Article six of the 1997 Law on the Media makes it illegal to “anticipate the outcome of a trial”, an extremely loose phrase that judges cane interpret to cover every phase and aspect of the process. It is also forbidden to influence the court “by other means” – a phrase that is again so vague that it could include almost anything, including the factual courtside reports that are commonplace in other countries.

The legal definition of defamation is similarly unclear, so that the mere mention of someone’s name could be regarded as libellous.

Finally, the media law also includes a catch-all prohibition on using the media in order to “commit other actions punishable by criminal or other law”. In the context of Uzbekistan, that can be interpreted to mean almost anything.

These heavy restrictions are in stark contrast to President Karimov’s repeated public calls for journalists to become more critical. In January, for instance, he used a speech to parliament to describe the press as "toothless", while on Journalists’ Day six months earlier, he urged them to dispense with self-censorship and expose wrongdoers in officialdom.

If the authorities wanted a free press, they would first have to live up to the generally accepted international standards and stop issuing covert bans on critical material. At the same time, they would need to allow reporters to carry out investigations and act on readers’ letters; reform the legislation governing the media; make it possible for journalists to defend themselves in court; and encourage awareness among journalists of their legal rights and obligations.

Victor Krymzalov is an independent media expert in Tashkent.

This article was produced as part of IWPR’s News Briefing Central Asia output, funded by the National Endowment for Democracy.