ASSOCIATED PRESS
ALMATY, Kazakhstan
Uzbekistan has failed to provide its citizens with basic legal rights despite some reforms in recent years, an international human rights group said Tuesday.
New York-based Human Rights Watch said in a report that torture remains pervasive in the former Soviet Central Asian nation and that independent legal professionals and rights activists have been hindered in their work.
The United States, which relies on Uzbekistan as a major supply route for its troops in neighboring Afghanistan, has applied some pressure over rights issues, but activists say little has been done.
“Driven by a short-term interest in Uzbekistan’s strategic importance ... the U.S. and the (European Union) have failed to respond to Uzbekistan’s deepening human rights crisis,” HRW said in its report.
Uzbekistan has sought to respond to Western concerns about its rights record as it attempts to end the isolation that followed its brutal suppression of an uprising in the city of Andijan in 2005. The Uzbek authorities said 187 people were killed and had blamed Islamists for stoking the violence. But witnesses and rights groups said government troops killed hundreds.
Some of the legal reforms put in place by Uzbekistan included the introduction of the right of judicial review of pretrial detention and the broadening of defendant’s access to legal counsel.
The report said the government has failed to put those reforms into action and has used them to claim that it was gradually liberalizing its criminal justice system.
