Media Rights

Uzbekistan briefly blocked access to Facebook on October 21, and also an article on a news site, newsru.com, ferghana.ru reports.

The independent Central Asian news site speculates that the reason for the closure yesterday might be the report issued October 20 by the Paris-based organization Reporters without Borders (RSF) which was critical of Uzbekistan's suppression of the media, ranking the Central Asian country at the 163rd place out of 178 countries. The report was widely covered by independent media in Central Asia.

Uzbeks were using Facebook, which was formerly tolerated in Uzbekistan, to publish links to sites that have long been blocked by the Uzbek government, including ferghana.ru, uznews.net, birdamlik.info and others. Facebook has become a serious factor in publicizing the banned sites, says ferghana.ru.

An article about the RSF report on newsru.com was also blocked, although other articles were displayed, says ferghana.ru. When readers clicked on the link, they were brought back to the home page.

Users using the mobile phone services MTS and Bee-line in Uzbekistan had no trouble accessing Facebook, but others using local providers found it was unavailable for a day.

[UPDATE] The government of Uzbekistan denied reports that it had blocked Facebook, saying the popular social network was accessible, the official site gazeta.uz reported. The state news site said some users interviewed said they were able to access Facebook, and others said they temporarily had trouble.

Azerbaijan and Armenia now share a double billing for their “not free” media, if little else. At least by Freedom House’s reckoning.

“The time for free speech has not arrived yet,” Armenian Press Club Chairman Boris Navasardian told colleagues. The Committee to Protect Journalists partly blames the 2008 post-election clashes that split Armenian media along political fault lines, it says.

The view from Baku is no less merry. Civil society activists and reporters chastise the government for what they describe as attempts to intimidate independent media.

Meanwhile, Georgia (along with Ukraine) heads the Freedom House FSU pack with a tag of “partly free.” No news on how that hit President Mikheil Saakashvili, who recently declared international concerns about Georgia’s media freedom to be “total bullshit.”