JUNE 11 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – Civil liberties in Azerbaijan have worsened considerably in the past five years, US Deputy Secretary of State, Thomas Melia said. Mr Melia’s statement during a testimony before the US Helsinki Commission were particularly poignant from a US diplomat.
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(News report from Issue No. 189, published on June 18 2014)
JUNE 6 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – A court in Uzbekistan ordered the release of the critically ill prisoner Abdurasul Khudoynazarov, media quoted Human Rights Watch as saying. Khudoynazarov had served 8-1/2 years of a 9 year prison sentence for allegedly stirring anti-government protests around the city of Andijan, east Uzbekistan.
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(News report from Issue No. 188, published on JUNE 11 2014)
JUNE 10 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – Four prisoners at a jail near Astana have slashed their stomachs with knives to protest against squalid living conditions and humiliating treatment from guards, the US-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reported. Human rights groups often cite poor prison conditions and the abuse of inmates as a major problem in Kazakhstan.
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(News report from Issue No. 188, published on JUNE 11 2014)
JUNE 2 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) -Amnesty International said the Turkmen authorities should free human rights activist Mansur Mingelov who has been on a hunger strike since May 19. Mingelov was protesting against his 22-year conviction for possessing drugs and child pornography. Turkmenistan has one of the worst human rights records in the world.
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(News report from Issue No. 187, published on JUNE 4 2014)
JUNE 2 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – Human Rights Watch said a court ruling of defamation against the independent news outlet Asia-Plus had damaged media freedom in Tajikistan. Last year, Asia-Plus wrote a story about a poet returning to Tajikistan. It expressed scepticism over the poet’s apparent praise of Tajik president Emomali Rakhmon.
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(News report from Issue No. 187, published on JUNE 4 2014)
MAY 27 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) -Risking the ire of human rights activists, Latvian President Andris Berzins travelled to Tashkent to meet with Uzbekistan’s leader Islam Karimov.
The human rights lobby reviles Mr Karimov for allegedly imprisoning and torturing his enemies, charges he denies. It also blames Uzbek soldiers for opening fire on civilians in the town of Andijan in 2005, killing hundreds.
Mr Berzins’ visit to Tashkent was made more controversial because a trip to Uzbekistan by a European leader is so rare.
Photos of Mr Karimov and Mr Berzins walking together and inspecting a guard of honour are a propaganda coup for Uzbekistan. Mr Karimov rarely gets to hob-knob with Western leaders. He normally has to make do with yet another glad-handing photo-shoot with a senior Chinese official or perhaps with a Central Asian colleague.
So this adds extra layers of significance to Mr Berzins’ Tashkent sojourn.
Latvia is also taking over the rotating presidency of the EU in 2015 and has promised to focus on improving relations with Central Asia.
Relations between the EU and Ubekistan have been improving. NATO’s extraction from neighbouring Afghanistan through Uzbekistan has mainly driven this reconciliation but, even so, Mr Karimov is kept at arm’s length. Earlier this year, Uzbek officials cancelled a trip by Mr Karimov to the Czech Republic because government ministers had indicated that they didn’t want to meet him.
Latvia, though, has taken a different approach. There’s little doubt that Latvian-Uzbek business will increase because of it, as will Mr Karimov’s domestic standing.
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(News report from Issue No. 187, published on JUNE 4 2014)
MAY 26 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – A court in Azerbaijan sentenced the well-regarded election monitor Anar Mammadli to 5-1/2 years in prison for tax evasion and illegal business dealings. Rights groups say Mammadli’s real crime was to be an opposition figure. The authorities are cracking down on anti-government figures.
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(News report from Issue No. 186, published on May 28 2014)
May 17 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – In 2013, Kazakhstan convicted 31 policemen of using torture, media reported.
This is an important statistic as it shows that the Kazakh authorities are not just paying lip service to the idea of reducing the use of torture by the security forces to obtain confessions, a routine criticism of Central Asian states by human rights groups.
The deputy prosecutor of Kazakhstan, Zhakyp Asanov, said that the number of investigations against Kazakh police in the past five years had increased tenfold. This, he said, underlined Kazakhstan’s commitment to improving human rights.
“We react to reports of torture immediately and take all required measures to investigate the report,” Mr Asanov said. Of course these actions are welcome and there are signs that this more humane approach to detainees is taking shape in Kazakhstan.
Earlier this year, a Kazakh court upheld a compensation claim ordered against the police for the torture of a man held in detention in March 2007.
That said, there is a lot more to do. Torture as a method to extract confessions from detainees is still fairly routine in Kazakhstan, rather than being isolated incidences, as Mr Asanov’s figures tend to suggest. Prison conditions are also considered poor.
In a report in 2013, Amnesty International said it “accused the President of Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbayev, of pulling the wool over the eyes of the international community in his government’s promise to eradicate torture and fully investigate the lethal force by police.”
Its report described torture as rife in Kazakh detention centres.
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(News report from Issue No. 185, published on May 21 2014)
May 15 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – The day after Azerbaijan assumed the chairmanship of the Council of Europe, a court in Baku sentenced an opposition journalist to eight years in prison for holding illegal weapons.
The Council of Europe is the European body, covering 47 countries, that supposedly spreads Europe’s ideals of human rights and democratic elections to wider Europe.
No matter that Azerbaijan has been heavily criticised over the past few years for crushing dissent and locking up troublesome journalists. It was its turn to head the group. The chairmanship rotates in alphabetical order every six months.
Parviz Hasimli, the now imprisoned activist, was just the latest opposition reporter to be sent to prison. There have been many before him. In most cases the defendants, with good reason, have said that the charges are politically motivated.
Azerbaijan has said that it will use its presidency of the Council of Europe to fight corruption and human rights.
This sound good but could well be a hollow promise. Corruption and human rights appear to be worsening in Azerbaijan.
Instead, for Azerbaijan, its chairmanship is useful as a smokescreen.
For many of Azerbaijan’s critics, its leadership of the Council of Europe, supposed to uphold human rights across the continent, is an insult.
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(News report from Issue No. 185, published on May 21 2014)
May 20 2014 (The Conway Bulletin)- A Tajik army conscript who died in April was beaten to death, the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) website reported. RFE/RL also reported that another army conscript has been paralysed from being beaten. Bullying and beatings are a major problem in militaries across the former Soviet Union.
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(News report from Issue No. 185, published on May 21 2014)