Penal Reformers Claim Small Victory in Uzbekistan
While the abolition of capital punishment has earned the regime some credit abroad, observers note that critics of the regime are still at risk.
Wednesday, 23 January, 2008
Penal Reformers Claim Small Victory in Uzbekistan
While the abolition of capital punishment has earned the regime some credit abroad, observers note that critics of the regime are still at risk.
Wednesday, 23 January, 2008
Chikunova only learned her son had been executed on July 12, 2000 – two days after his death. But she still does not know where her son’s body lies, and nor do hundreds of relatives of other executed prisoners.
When she wants to talk to her son, Tamara goes to the Russian cemetery in Tashkent, one of the oldest graveyards in the Uzbek capital. There, next to her father’s grave, a small gravestone with Dmitry’s picture on it rises above a small heap of earth that a Russian Orthodox priest blessed for her.
Dmitry Chikunov was arrested in April 1999 as part of a murder investigation. In November that year, a Tashkent court sentenced him to death and, after the Supreme Court rejected his appeal, he was executed.
The only personal effect Chikunova obtained was a letter from Dmitry, smuggled out of prison, in which he wrote that officers had threatened to rape him unless he signed a confession.
Such brutal methods of extracting confessions are frequently used by the Uzbek police, according to human rights groups.
On January 1 this year, Chikunova’s organisation Mothers against the Death Penalty and Torture, which she founded to honour her son’s memory, marked the official abolition of the death penalty in Uzbekistan.
“This is a truly great event for Uzbekistan,” she said.
Last June, the Uzbek parliament amended the penal code to replace capital punishment with life and long-term imprisonment. In August, the death penalty was formally abolished under a decree issued by President Islam Karimov. The change came into force on the first day of 2008.
“Now that the death penalty has been officially removed, we want the case of every single [death row] prisoner to be reviewed individually,” said Chikunova. “If all these sentences are simply automatically replaced by life imprisonment or long terms, it will be wrong.”
Surat Ikramov, head of the Tashkent-based Initiative Group of Independent Human Rights Activists, also urges the authorities to reconsider the capital cases separately.
“But, of course, if these cases are reviewed without the convicted persons themselves being involved, it will be difficult to expect results,” he added.
Whether the authorities are about to review the cases of former death row inhabitants remains to be seen. For now, it looks most unlikely.
Under existing law, people jailed for life can only appeal for clemency after they have completed 25 years of their sentence.
One woman told IWPR she feared that abolition of the death sentence would simply mean automatic conversion into life sentences.
As the sister of a man sentenced to death in 2004, she said she had written regularly to the authorities requesting an appeal.
“Nothing happened, and now that capital punishment has been abolished, I’m afraid my brother will simply get a 30-year prison term,” she said.
The government has made much of the legal change, which has brought rare sympathetic coverage of Uzbekistan from the foreign media and international organisations. The European Union praised Uzbekistan for the move in a statement posted on the website of its presidency on January 11.
Information is scant on how many people were judicially executed in Uzbekistan over the past 17 years of independence.
During those years Uzbekistan obtained a reputation as one of the most repressive former Soviet states.
“We have repeatedly urged the government to publish figures on how many death sentences were handed down and how many were executed,” says Chikunova. “We also call on the authorities to tell the relatives where their family members were buried”.
But official Tashkent has not published any hard figures on the number of death sentences and executions.
Tashkent-based commentator Ibrahim Rasulov says the EU’s congratulations look ridiculous in the light of the regime’s continuing use of torture against dissidents in prison.
The government stands accused of using extra-judicial methods to remove dissidents and others seen as troublemakers without trial or sentence.
“In my opinion,” said Rasulov, “the EU should have called on the authorities of Uzbekistan to stop its elimination of dissidents and start meaningful democratic reforms.”
Another journalist from Fergana in the southeast, who preferred to stay unnamed, noted that despite the formal abolition of the death penalty, critics of the authoritarian regime still risk being killed – even when they are outside the country.
“People who too often or openly criticize the present regime are especially at risk,” the journalist said, citing the murder last October of the prominent journalist Alisher Saipov.
Saipov, a Kyrgyzstan national of Uzbek ethnicity, was shot dead in Osh, a city in southern Kyrgyzstan, close to the border with Uzbekistan.
In his Uzbek-language weekly Siyosat (Politics), Saipov frequently criticised Tashkent officials and the regime’s repressive policies against Muslims.
Before his still unexplained death, Uzbekistan’s state-controlled media publicly slated him as an “enemy of the Uzbek nation”.
Kyrgyz ombudsman Tursunbay Bakir-Uulu claims the Uzbek secret service received orders to kill the journalist, citing sources in his own country’s Kyrgyzstan security agencies.
Nervous of the implications of offending their powerful neighbour, the Kyrgyz authorities have yet to make the claim publicly, and are unlikely to do so, judging from the police investigation which has focused instead on other suspects such as Islamic radicals.
