Rights groups discount announced amnesty

Rights activists have dismissed a proposed amnesty by the authoritarian government of President Islam Karimov to free up to 7,000 prisoners, describing the move as mere window dressing to appease international pressure groups. "There was such an amnesty last year. The government is under international pressure as thousands of Muslims have been wrongly prosecuted and imprisoned following court hearings that were unfair," Tolib Yokubov, the head of the Human Rights Society of Uzbekistan, told IRIN from the Uzbek capital, Tashkent, on Wednesday. His comments came one day after a decree published in government newspapers said repentant prisoners serving up to 10 years for a first offence of belonging to "extremist religious organisations" might be freed, a Reuters report said. Petty criminals, women, men over 60, foreigners and seriously ill prisoners would also be eligible for the amnesty. No exact figures for the number of prisoners eligible were available, and senior police officials could not be reached for comment. The amnesty would take place on Constitution Day, 8 December, the decree said. The amnesty had been at least the fourth Karimov had announced since September 2000. Official figures showed that 4,092 prisoners were freed under an amnesty declared for Constitution Day in 2002, including 923 "extremists", the report added. But according to Yokubov, the move was merely an attempt to silence critics of the country's dismal human rights record, noting that the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) had earlier given Tashkent one year to substantially improve it, an objective the former Soviet state had failed to reach. He noted in some facilities, such as the Chirchick prisons, which housed more than 800 prisoners of conscience, only a dozen inmates would benefit from the amnesty. "The government is making a fool not only of Uzbek society but also of the international community," he asserted. Meanwhile, Matilda Bogner, office head of Human Rights Watch (HRW) in Tashkent, was more cautious. "It's difficult to see at this stage how it [the amnesty] will be implemented," she said, noting that in the past, the authorities had failed to release people who would otherwise appear to come under the amnesty, when they were political or religious prisoners. This was accomplished by accusing such prisoners of having breached internal prison rules - which could also mean that people were being punished for crimes they hadn't committed - in order to stop them from qualifying for amnesty. And while the amnesty included a section which covered people who potentially might have been imprisoned for their religious or political views, it was conditional on their being completely reformed and repentant of their views. "This is certainly something of concern and something that has been in the last two amnesties, which has led in the past to increases in torture in prisons," Bogner claimed, explaining that prison authorities would try to force religious and political prisoners to ask for forgiveness from the government. "And if they refuse to do so, they are subject to punishment, which includes beatings, being placed in punishment cells under difficult conditions, and so on," she said. Vasila Inoyatova, head of the E'zgulik Human Rights Society of Uzbekistan agreed, telling IRIN that the amnesty was announced generally, but not necessarily implemented by the same bodies, suggesting that prisoners often had to pay US $1,000 to be covered by the amnesty, or to have their prison terms reduced. As for how large a prison population the country had, Inoyatova remarked that she had spoken to an official from the national security service, who had told her there were some 200,000 prisoners, 3,400 of them for religious and political beliefs. But HRW says the numbers are higher, maintaining a conservative estimate of some 6,000 prisoners of conscience. "This is enormous, much more than in Soviet times," Bogner maintained. Asked if Tashkent might be using such amnesties, now a routine occurrence, to alleviate international pressure on its dismal human rights record, Bogner observed: "Certainly I think over the last three years it has been used as a bargaining chip with international players in the region when they include the religious and political prisoners in the amnesties." Although Karimov enjoys good relations with the United States in return for his support for Washington's "war on terror" in neighbouring Afghanistan, he has faced a deluge of criticism from rights activists and some Western diplomats for a lack of political freedoms and widespread torture of political prisoners in the country's jails.