Amnesty calls to commute death penalty sentences

The international rights watchdog, Amnesty International (AI), has called upon Tashkent to commute the capital sentences of two prisoners allegedly tortured to confess to murder. “We are calling on the Uzbek authorities to commute the sentences of Ikram Mukhtarov and Yusuf Zhumayev and all other death penalty sentences,” Anna Sunder-Plassmann, AI researcher for Central Asia, told IRIN from London on Monday, fearing both prisoners were allegedly tortured into making their confessions. Zhumayev, 21, accused of murdering his brother’s wife, his niece and his nephew, was sentenced to death by the Sukhandarya regional court on 28 April. According to an AI statement on Saturday, he has consistently maintained his innocence and stated that he had been threatened that his parents and sister would be arrested if he did not confess to being guilty. Sunder-Plassmann noted that he testified during his trial that he had been tortured, but his “allegations were ignored.” Zhumayev’s brother, husband and father of the murder victims, said that he didn’t believe Zhumayev was a murderer and added that he never had bad intentions against his family, AI reported. In a separate case, the Tashkent city court sentenced Ikram Mukhtarov, convicted of murdering a woman and a man in May 2001, to death on 24 May. AI said that he also made allegations of torture in court, but these were reportedly not investigated. "The UN Special Rapporteur on torture said that torture and similar ill-treatment were systematic in Uzbekistan," the AI official maintained, explaining that her organisation was receiving up to 1,100 alleged reports of torture in the Central Asian state each year. In light of the torture allegations, the UN Human Rights Committee urged the Uzbek authorities on 19 July to stay these executions, as well as to establish whether provisions of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights had been violated in their cases. However, Uzbekistan has ignored UN Human Rights Committee interventions in some 12 cases in the past. “Both of them [Zhumayev and Mukhtarov] are now believed to be in a particular prison in Tashkent where people are given electric shocks,” Sunder-Plassmann claimed, concerned that the executions could happen very soon, as neither the convicted nor their relatives had been informed of the execution's date. Since 2000, the death sentences of at least 13 cases have been replaced by long term imprisonment in cases that AI and the UN Human Rights Committee have taken up. "It is very clear that pressure from international community can have an impact," she stressed, calling on the world community to exert great pressure on Tashkent. Belarus and Uzbekistan are the last two countries in the former Soviet Union which still execute prisoners. Several local human rights groups in Uzbekistan believe that more than 200 people are executed every year. "Uzbekistan is the one which executes the most," Sunder-Plassmann maintained, calling upon the authorities to make significant moves to abolish the death penalty by introducing a moratorium on such executions.