In 2008, Uzbekistan announced it had instituted habeas corpus reforms into domestic law, requiring judges to show cause for detention of prisoners rather than prosecutors holding them arbitrarily and incommunicado.
Merely by indicating its intention to mitigate its harsh prison system, Tashkent undeservedly gained the credibility that sometimes accrues to post-Soviet states seeming to turn a corner. Uzbekistan began to benefit from USAID and European Union funded trainings and seminars and technical assistance grants. For years now, Uzbek delegations have been dining out on the habeas corpus story at international human rights meetings.
After awhile, Human Rights Watch, the independent international monitoring organization, found these claims to be hollow when they interviewed numerous former prisoners and their relatives in Uzbekistan and in exile abroad, and learned how they had been jailed arbitrarily and tortured into making confessions.
Writing in the New York Times today, HRW's Uzbekistan researcher Steve Swerdlow reports on his findings:
Habeas corpus — judicial review of detention — is considered a crucial bulwark against torture in pretrial detention, but true habeas corpus exists neither in theory nor in practice in Uzbekistan. The Uzbek version doesn’t allow the court to examine whether there’s sufficient evidence to hold someone in jail before trial. And although habeas corpus means “show the body,” not only are the hearings closed to observers, but sometimes the detainees aren’t even present. Even when they are, judges simply rubber stamp detention, routinely ignoring any allegations of ill-treatment or abuse of due process.
Swerdlow says thousands of prisoners have been accused of Muslim "fundamentalism" and been tortured, then tried behind closed doors. Then those who try to report on this grave injustice, whether relatives or human rights activists and independent journalists, are themselves persecuted.
Evidently due to such critical reporting, Human Right Watch was recently forced to leave Uzbekistan after some years attempting to maintain a presence in the country as the government denied staff accreditation and liquidated the office. Yet the credulousness of some Western officials dies hard -- even as Human Rights Watch was booted, another group funded by the EU, called Regional Dialogue, was registered by the Uzbek authorities to conduct a presumably more tame human rights program.
HRW has already published some of the grim facts of torture cases researched and is now working on a lengthier report about why habeas corpus is a sham in Uzbekistan -- one obvious problem is that the Ministry of Justice took over the bar last year, and many independent lawyers who used to try to put judicial review into practice are now disbarred.
While Uzbek officials go on misleading foreigners, it is very hard to get the facts from inside the country -- authorities are increasingly blocking news outlets and recently ordered telecom operators to report on suspicious texting.
They seem to have some effect. Last week, for example, Judge Dilbar Israilova of Tashkent's Shayhantahur District Civil Court refused to allow press, human rights activists and a representative of the British Embassy to monitor a trial involving two critical television journalists who were seeking to appeal their dismissal by state television management. Acting Court Chairman Mansur Imamov denied a petition by the TV journalists to remove Judge Israilova from the case. At a previous hearing February 22, Judge Israilova had ordered a journalist, Vasily Markov, to leave the courtroom, claiming he was the one to have sent live messages on Twitter about the proceedings to Radio Ozodlik, the Uzbek Service of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.
The former Yoshlar (Youth) television broadcasters, Saodat Omonova and Malohat Eshonkulova were fired after complaining about censorship and embezzlement of funds at the TV station.
Tashkent has been able to get away with such abuses, says Swerdlow, because the West is re-engaging with Uzbekistan due to its assistance in the war in Afghanistan and its natural resources, seemingly heedless of the consequences:
Recent events in the Middle East show that unconditional support for “friendly autocrats” is short-sighted and counterproductive. The United States and the European Union should rethink their positions and send a clear message to Uzbekistan that brutalizing its own people and stonewalling international reporting comes at a price.
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