Tag Archives: human rights

COMMENT — Kazakhstan and Georgia have a long way to go on human rights

> Kazakhstan and Georgia need to treat the disadvantaged with more respect to truly develop, writes James Kilner

The Human Rights Watch report on how state-run institutions treat physically and mentally disabled children in their care makes for particularly grim reading.

It cites children, the loud and less obedient ones, as saying that they are often chained to their beds and drugged into a dreamless sleep that can last 24 hours. They are beaten; made to feel like unwanted prisoners, rather than disabled children. When they reach adulthood, they transfer to an adult version of their children’s institution, thus ensuring a life sentence.

There is often no escape.

The report also pointedly says that of the 2,000 disabled children in the 19 state-run institutions, most are not orphaned. Reading between the lines, it is easier for the Kazakh government to take these children out of society than deal with them in a more humane way.

And this is the real shame in it all. A society that can’t treat the disadvantaged with respect will always be held back. This goes for the poor too.

Last week a 16-year-old boy in Tbilisi fell down a liftshaft on the construction site that he was working on. He had been working on the 14th-floor of the building.

Media said that the boy had come from a poor background and that he had spent much of his early teenage years working jobs to support his mother in his town in regional Georgia. The construction job that killed him was just an extension of this way-of-life.

According to Georgian law, the boy was legally allowed to work aged 16 but he wasn’t allowed do hard manual labour until he was 18-years-old.

The dead boy has also become a statistic, one of several construction workers to die in Tbilisi this year. The Georgian government has allowed poor migrants from the regions to risk their lives on poorly regulated construction sites in Tbilisi for too long.

Both Kazakhstan and Georgia have aspirations to be taken seriously as developed countries but it is not enough to build glitzy airports, five-star hotels and successful sports teams. The true test of a country’s development is how they treat their least advantaged. By this measure, both Kazakhstan and Georgia must try harder.
ENDS

— This story was first published in issue 417 of the weekly Central Asia & South Caucasus Bulletin

Tajik court jails policeman for torture

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FEB. 1 (The Conway Bulletin) — Tajikistan jailed a policeman for 13 years for a series of crimes, including torture, in a rare case that highlights corruption and abuse of power in the security forces in Central Asia. AFP reported that a closed court in the northern city of Khujand jailed Shukhrat Shamsiddinov at the end of January for torturing and extorting money from Komil Khodjanazarov, detained in 2017 for belonging to a banned group. Khodjanazarov was released from detention but killed himself when he was summoned to return to the police station for questioning. Human rights activists say torture is rife in Tajik prisons.
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>This story was first published in issue 399 of The Conway Bulletin on Feb. 8 2019
Copyright The Conway Bulletin 2019

Human rights groups say forced labour still exists in Uzbekistan

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FEB. 7 (The Conway Bulletin) — Two human rights groups said that forced labour in Uzbekistan was still a major problem despite assurances by the government that it had been eradicated in its cotton industry. Uzbek-German Forum for Human Rights and the U.S.-based Solidarity Center said in a report based on 260 interviews that teachers and other public sector workers were still expected to clean streets, plant trees and harvest wheat.
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>This story was first published in issue 399 of The Conway Bulletin on Feb. 8 2019
Copyright The Conway Bulletin 2019

Germany punishes MP for taking Azerbaijani money

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JAN. 29 (The Conway Bulletin) — Karin Strenz, a German MP from the ruling Christian Democratic Party, has become the first parliamentarian to be punished by his/her home country for taking cash and gifts from Azerbaijan between 2012-14, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said.

HRW said that on Jan. 18 Germany’s Bundestag had ruled that Ms Strenz had broken parliamentary rules in a “cash-for-lobbying” scandal that has been dubbed by anti-corruption campaigners as the “Azerbaijani Laundromat”. Ms Strenz faces a fine of up to $68,000. She has also faced calls from within the Christian Democratic Party to resign.

But, critically for HRW, Ms Strenz is the only one of 16 members of the Parliamentary Assembly for the Council of Europe (PACE) to be punished by their national parliaments since being thrown out of PACE for taking the gifts and cash in exchange for defending Azerbaijan’s human rights record.

In a statement, Hugh Williamson, HRW’s director for Europe and Central Asia, said: “This is the most shocking aspect…Let’s hope politicians in Spain, Belgium, and other parliaments hit by the scandal will quickly follow the Bundestag’s lead. It’s about standing up for human rights in Azerbaijan, and in Europe as a whole.”

Last year, PACE published a report that described a patronage and influence network set up by Azerbaijan to help it steer debates in the Assembly where people were openly criticising Baku’s human rights record.

Over the past decade, Azerbaijan has jailed dozens of opposition activists and journalists for financial crimes and drug smuggling, charges that many have said have been fabricated.

Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev is sensitive to criticism from Europe, particularly because, at the time, he had been trying to secure a major gas supply deal.

The PACE report in 2018 said that Italian Luca Volonte was at the centre of the 2.4m euro corruption scandal to buy support in the Assembly for Azerbaijan.

He is being investigated in Italy for corruption, although a court in Milan cleared him of money laundering February 2018.

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>This story was first published in issue 398 of The Conway Bulletin on Jan. 31 2019
Copyright The Conway Bulletin 2019

Uzbekistan extradites ex-BTA banker to Kazakhstan

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JAN. 28 (The Conway Bulletin) — Uzbekistan extradited Kazakh Artur Trofimov, a former executive at BTA Bank, to Kazakhstan for suspected money laundering and embezzlement. BTA Bank was a bank that the Kazakh government had to buy in 2008/9 to rescue it from bankruptcy. Its former chairman, Mukhtar Ablyazov, is currently in Paris after appealing against an extradition order. A French judge agreed with his argument that he was at risk of torture if he was returned to Kazakhstan. Since fleeing Kazakhstan in 2009, Ablyazov has turned himself into the leading critic of Pres. Nursultan Nazarbayev.
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>This story was first published in issue 398 of The Conway Bulletin on Jan. 31 2019
Copyright The Conway Bulletin 2019

Azerbaijan extradites Gulenist to Turkey

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JAN. 30 (The Conway Bulletin) — Azerbaijan extradited to Turkey another alleged Gulenist, the group the Turkish government accuses of an attempted coup in 2016. Turkish media named the alleged Gulenist as Ibrahim E, the editor of a Gulen newspaper in Baku. Turkey has been applying pressure to its neighbours to extradite suspected Gulenist, followers of the exiled cleric Fethullah Gulen. Azerbaijan, a strong Turkish ally, has been quick to acquiesce to Turkey’s demands. Others, such as Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, where Gulenists set up universities and schools in the post-Soviet 1990s, have been less keen.
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>This story was first published in issue 398 of The Conway Bulletin on Jan. 31 2019
Copyright The Conway Bulletin 2019

Uzbekistan frees businessman from prison

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TASHKENTJAN. 8 (The Conway Bulletin) — The authorities in Uzbekistan have freed from prison businessman Mirodil Jalolov, former CEO of Zeromax — once the country’s biggest company.

His wife told RFE/RL that a court released Mr Mirodli after a short hearing linked to corruption charges. In 2010, when a closed-court jailed him, the charges against Mr Mirodli were not released.

Zeromax had once been an all-powerful conglomerate with stakes in a range of assets across Uzbekistan from mining, to football, to logistics. Analysts had said Zeromax was ultimately owned by Gulnara Karimova, the eldest daughter of Islam Karimov, the former Uzbek president.

She has been in jail since 2014 when she was arrested on various corruption charges. Her father died in 2016.

Mr Mirodli was arrested in 2010 shortly after the Uzbek government took control of Zeromax. It said it had seized Zeromax’s assets because it owed its creditors $500m. Some analysts saw the move as a revolt by rival regime members and the first public sign of decline for the once all-powerful Karimov family.
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>>This story was first published in issue 396 of The Conway Bulletin on Jan. 11 2019

European human rights court fines Azerbaijan

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JAN. 10 (The Conway Bulletin) — The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ordered Azerbaijan to pay journalist Khadija Ismayilova 16,750 euros compensation for failing to investigate a 2012 blackmail campaign against her that hinged around an online sex video.

The ruling damages Azerbaijan’s already-poor reputation for media rights just as it prepares to become a major gas supplier to Europe.

Azerbaijan “had had a duty to investigate. However, there had been significant flaws and delays in the investigation, even though there had been obvious leads,” the ECHR said in a statement.

The ECHR, though, stopped short of blaming the Azerbaijani government for the blackmail. “It had not been possible to establish ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ that the State itself had been responsible for the very serious invasion of Ms Ismayilova’s privacy,” it said.

Her supporters said the government tried to intimidate Ms Ismayilova, one of Azerbaijan’s most high-profile journalists, because she had been investigating corruption claims against Azerbaijani Pres. Ilham Aliyev.

When it failed, her supporters said, officials fabricated evidence that she had been involved with corruption. She served 537 days in prison, being released in May 2016. Azerbaijani officials have not commented.

This year, Azerbaijan is expected to start pumping gas from its Caspian Sea fields to Europe along the so-called Southern Gas Corridor.

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>>This story was first published in issue 396 of The Conway Bulletin on Jan. 11 2019

Kazakhstan denies asylum to whistle-blower of Chinese camps

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OCT. 5 (The Conway Bulletin) – Human rights activists accused Kazakhstan of caving into Chinese pressure after it refused to grant asylum to an ethnic Kazakh who had fled across the border earlier this year from China where she said that she had been forced to work at an internment camp set up to ‘re-educate’ Uighurs. In August a court had agreed not to send Sayragul Sauytbay back to China for illegally crossing into the country earlier in the year. Instead it gave her a suspended prison sentence and set her free. During her earlier trial, Ms Sauytbay had testified that China had set up a series of camps to ‘re-educate’ the Xinjiang region’s Muslim communities, mainly Uighurs but also ethnic Kazakhs, Kyrgyz and Hui.

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>>This story was first published in issue 388 of The Conway Bulletin on Oct. 17 2018

Uzbek opposition activist returns home

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SEPT. 26 (The Conway Bulletin) – Prominent Uzbek opposition activist Tolib Yoqubov, 78, returned to Uzbekistan for the first time in more than a decade from Paris where he had been living in exile. Mr Yoqubov had been a persistent critic of former Uzbek leader Islam Karimov and had fled the country in 2007, fearing for his life. Current Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoyev is planning to visit Paris next month to meet with French Pres. Emmanuel Macron.
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>>This story was published in issue 387 of The Conway Bulletin on Oct. 1 2018