Freedom House staff "harassed and intimidated"

The international human rights NGO Freedom House (FH) has expressed concern on Tuesday over harassment of its staff by the Uzbek authorities, urging them to desist. "We are entitled to deal exactly with the type of training that we had planned. We have done it before, and it wasn't deemed illegal, so it wasn't illegal at this time," Michael Goldfarb, an FH senior press officer, told IRIN from New York, adding that FH was fully registered with the foreign ministry to operate in the country. He said during the difficulties encountered recently, the NGO's staff members had shown their registration papers issued by the ministry to the local authorities, which ignored them. His comments came after the alleged harassment and intimidation of staff from the Washington-based rights watchdog group. On 21 November, staff members said, authorities under the direction of Rustam Ismatullaev, a local government official, had prevented them from holding a training session for human rights activists in the eastern city of Namangan in the Ferghana Valley. An aggressive crowd had surrounded the FH staff members, verbally abusing them and threatening violence, the NGO said in a statement on Monday. "The Uzbek government must immediately call on its local authorities to desist from this campaign of intimidation of both Freedom House and the Uzbek human rights community," Jennifer Windsor, the FH executive director, said in a statement on Monday. According to FH, on the day of the scheduled training session, several cars followed and then blocked a car carrying its staff members, preventing them from reaching their office in Namangan. The chairman of a local collective farm then organised a group of 80 local people to confront the staff and prevent the training programme from going ahead. However, Azizbek Abduvaliev, the Namangan provincial governor's press secretary, told IRIN from the city on Tuesday that the FH staff members had probably failed to obtain official permission to conduct the training. "In this case, it is illegal to do that," he noted. FH considers the harassment by local government officials to be a consequence of its work in Uzbekistan in assisting local human rights monitors. "I would suspect that it's the nature of our work: we are training human rights defenders in Uzbekistan, which has a human rights problem. It would stand to reason that the type of work we are doing is considered sensitive by the government," Goldfarb said. Goldfarb urged the Uzbek authorities to allow NGOs such as FH - and even more importantly the local people with whom they work -to conduct their activities freely, and not to harass and intimidate them. "The fact that they do harass and intimidate human rights workers and journalist only underscores the importance of this type of work - underscores the human rights problems that exist in the country," he asserted.