Government wants UN mission on torture to return

The Uzbek government is eager to accept a new United Nations assessment mission on torture and plans to launch a special programme on fighting such human rights abuses, a government official has said. Ilkhom Zakirov, the Uzbek foreign minister's spokesman told IRIN from the capital, Tashkent on Tuesday that Uzbek authorities would welcome a new UN mission on torture in the view of recent changes. "We would like Theo van Boven [UN Special Rapporteur on Torture] to come back again and see the changes [regarding torture issues] in the country," he said. A report by Theo van Boven, following a mission to the country in 2002, found that torture in Uzbek jails had been systematic and routinely used against opponents to obtain confessions which sometimes resulted in courts giving the death penalty. But after years of denial, Tashkent recently accepted there was a problem. "There are indeed some cases [of torture] and we admit that they have taken place and more than that, some law-enforcement officers have been recently convicted of using torture," Zakirov said. According to the Uzbek foreign ministry, for the first time, the Uzbek civil code had a special article which recognised torture as a crime and fifteen people from the interior ministry were convicted and brought to justice for committing violations of prisoners' human rights. However, the authorities maintain such incidents are exceptional and by no means the rule. "We didn't agree then and don't agree now that it is systematic," Zakirov said. And while the authorities have denied van Boven's claims of torture being systematic in jails, the findings and proposals of the mission had been thoroughly studied, with some action being carried out to make improvements, Zakirov maintained, saying that such changes were part of a process of liberalising the country's overall legal and correctional systems. As a result, the number of offences for which capital punishment could be applied had been decreased from five to two by the end of last year, he said. Theo van Boven told IRIN from Geneva on Tuesday that it was important that Uzbekistan be the subject of close and regular human rights monitoring. "In this regard, attention is drawn to the recommendation which invites the government of Uzbekistan not only to ratify the Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture, which provides for regular visits to all places of detention in the country, but also to invite the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention and the Special Representative of the Secretary-General on human rights defenders, as well as the Special Rapporteur on the independence of judges and lawyers, to carry out visits to Uzbekistan," he ascertained. Please go to www.unhchr.ch for a copy of the Report of the Special Rapporteur on Torture in Uzbekistan