Uzbeks Allow Red Cross Jail Visits
Monday, 7 April, 2008
Uzbeks Allow Red Cross Jail Visits
Monday, 7 April, 2008
In mid-March, the International Committee of the Red Cross, ICRC, issued a press release saying that after three years of negotiations, a mission was to visit prisons in Uzbekistan. It said an agreement was in place to allow visits to take place in accordance with the ICRC’s standard working procedures as applied in other countries.
“This means that we will be able to talk with detainees in private and will have access to all detainees and to all premises in the places of detention.,” said Yves Giovannoni, the head of the ICRC’s regional delegation in Tashkent.
The authorities have given the ICRC permission to visit prisons for a six-month trial period.
Red Cross prison inspections halted completely in August 2005, following the violence in Andijan in May that year when the security forces opened fire on a demonstation, killing and injuring several hundred people. When the international community pressed for an independent investigation, the Uzbek authorities closed the offices of more than 300 international organisations and foreign media.
Human rights activists say the decision to open up the jails to the ICRC has everything to do with the forthcoming review of EU sanctions, imposed in November 2005 in response to the Uzbeks’ refusal to allow an independent international inquiry.
The sanctions included a partial suspension of the Partnership and Cooperation Agreement which governs EU-Uzbek relations; an embargo on EU sales of weapons to Uzbekistan and a year-long visa ban on 12 top officials believed to have played a role in the use of force against demonstrators. Last October, EU foreign ministers eased the sanctions, suspending the visa restrictions against officials for a six-month period.
Now the sanctions are to be reviewed again on April 28.
Nadezhda Ataeva, who chairs the Human Rights in Central Asia Association, based in France, said the prison deal formed part of a Tashkent’s current strategy of making concessions to the EU. But she added, “Unfortunately, the authorities have taken this step too late in the day, and we won’t be able to carry out a full study of the position of detainees by the [April 28] deadline.”
At the same time, Ataeva emphasised that the resumption of ICRC visits was a positive thing for those human rights activists and journalists currently imprisoned for their efforts to investigate the Andijan violence.
“They are in poor health, and ICRC mission’s access will at least make it possible to get them render medical and humanitarian assistance,” she explained.
According to Human Rights Watch, nine human rights activists were jailed for political reasons in 2006. One was released in February 2008 under an amnesty the authorities declared in November.
Although the restricted nature of the ICRC’s activities means they are unlikely to have much effect on the general human rights situation in Uzbekistan, commentators interviewed by IWPR said they expected other international organisations to begin trickling back to the country.
“The president [Islam Karimov] and his milieu have realised it will be very hard to carry out economic or political reform in the future without [help from] the international community,” said Surat Ikramov, a lawyer with the Initiative Group of Independent Human Rights Defenders in Uzbekistan.
Another lawyer, who did not want to be named, predicted that many of the foreign organisations that left Uzbekistan following Andijan events will gradually get accreditation again. But he said the Uzbek authorities would have to take the initiative, and so far they had not made it clear how this could happen,
“Things have started moving, but it is very hard to predict how things will go in future,” he said.
(NBCentralAsia is an IWPR-funded project to create a multilingual news analysis and comment service for Central Asia, drawing on the expertise of a broad range of political observers across the region. The project ran from August 2006 to September 2007, covering all five regional states. With new funding, the service is resuming, covering only Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan for the moment).
