Uzbekistan's "Revolutionary" Rights Reform

The Uzbek government’s new strategy for human rights outlines a series of positive changes to the law, yet rights groups in the country say the state’s record remains as dismal as ever.

The new human rights programme was drafted in August, and is intended to be the centrepiece of the government’s submission to the United Nations Human Rights Council, which will review the case of Uzbekistan in spring next year.

The 48-page paper tells an uplifting story of progress to date, and plans for new laws on freedom of assembly, access to information, open government and the like.

Svetlana Artykova, who chairs the legislative committee of the Senate or upper house of the Uzbek parliament, said the draft programme was the "the most revolutionary” document yet designed on human rights.

"Uzbekistan has chosen a path of further liberalising the legal and judicial system and all other areas of life, and this will form the basis for subsequent, more profound democratic changes," she said.

Surat Ikramov, who heads the Initiative Group of Independent Human Rights Defenders, pointed out the glaring disparity between the government’s ambitious declarations and its continuing practice of manufacturing criminal cases to eliminate those it sees as opponents. Last month, his group observed an increase in the number of people detained and then tortured to make them confess to subversive Islamic activity.

"How can we talk about human rights when the police are out of control, with free license to abuse human rights with impunity?" he asked.

In terms of signing documents, Uzbekistan has certainly made progress, ratifying around 70 international conventions relating to human rights and introducing changes to domestic laws governing the criminal code, the courts, and civil society.

The paperwork, however, bears very little relation to the unremittingly poor observance of basic human rights by the state. Uzbekistan is consistently ranked among the world’s worst offenders by watchdog groups like Freedom House, which in June described the country as a repressive state in which grave abuses are systematic, torture is widespread, dissidents are harassed and jailed, and freedom of speech is minimal.

"Dozens of excellent laws can be produced, but if the authorities aren’t interested in discussing the problems, they will have little effect," Yelena Urlaeva, leader of the Human Rights Alliance of Uzbekistan, said. "the few independent human rights groups that exist are still the only real mechanism for defending human rights in Uzbekistan."

Apart from one group called Ezgulik, human rights groups have been denied official recognition, making their members vulnerable to persecution.

Suhrob Ismoilov, leader of Expert Working Group, a think-tank in Tashkent, says the only way of making the proposed human rights strategy effective would be by involving the kind of independent rights groups that the government now marginalises. At the moment, he said, human rights monitoring is assigned to official agencies which, though notionally independent, are “created and controlled by it [the state] and which, because they fear it and depend on it, are unable to act independently and hence effectively”.

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