Court closes local media support group for six months

The Uzbek authorities have temporarily closed a local media support group amid reports of government pressure on NGOs promoting pro-democracy movements ahead of parliamentary elections due in December. Tashkent city court ruled on Monday that the activities of the Internyus NGO should be halted for six months after finding it guilty of not following internal regulations and of breaching the country's laws on NGOs. "The court ruling was baseless and a pretext to continue the pressure on NGOs working with foreign donors ahead of parliamentary elections due in December," Kholida Anorboeva, head of the Internews-Uzbekistan office, told IRIN in the Uzbek capital, Tashkent, on Monday. The Internyus NGO was set up in 2001 by local and international staff members of the local branch of Internews Network, an international group that supports open media worldwide. The organisation fosters independent media in emerging democracies, produces innovative television and radio programming and Internet content, and uses the media to reduce conflict within and between countries. According to Anorboeva, suspending NGO activity for insignificant breaches, which were corrected in time in accordance with the Justice Ministry's demand, underlines the Uzbek government's determination to strictly control NGO activity in Central Asia's most populous country. The justice department's investigation in July concluded that Internyus failed to indicate that its operations extend outside of the capital, had not informed the authorities of a change of address and had not registered its logo with the Tashkent justice department. The group was given one month to correct this. "We submitted corrected documents to the Justice Ministry in time and the submission of documents was registered. But, replying to the court's demand, the ministry said that they had received no documents from us," Anorboeva said. Journalists from a number of regions, especially Samarkand and Bukhara, had taken part in training held in Tashkent. "But this does not mean we had expanded our activity beyond the city where we have been registered. Journalists from the regions have only been trained here in the capital," she pointed out. Earlier this year, the Uzbek authorities closed down the office of billionaire philanthropist George Soros's Open Society Institute (OSI) for breaching the country's laws, and warned two other US-funded international NGOs to refrain from supporting local opposition movements. In February 2004, the Uzbek government obliged all NGOs to receive grants only via two Uzbek banks - National Bank and Central Bank - and established a special commission, involving representatives of the government, the Central Bank and the security service, to check the use of grants from foreign donors. NGO workers claim that it sometimes takes more than three to four months for the commission to allow or suspend money transfers awaited by local NGOs, while the commission may also return the grant money to the donor. "The aim of the government decree is to prevent groups that potentially might support terrorism or radical groups from being financed from abroad, but in reality all humanitarian NGOs, even those working with disabled children and women, are suffering. They cannot receive their grant money for months," the head of a well-known NGO in Tashkent, who did not want to be identified, told IRIN. "There is no use arguing with the members of the government commission on the needs of certain groups, [for example] women or the disabled," she added. "We were surprised to hear one of the members saying 'There cannot be [any] crisis among Uzbek women, so we don't need any women's crisis centres'." Facing the same problem, Internyus earlier this year braced itself to warn the authorities that they would sue the government commission for unlawfully freezing their bank accounts. "After that we started receiving inspections from various organisations," a staff member told IRIN. Internews-Uzbekistan has conducted more than 50 seminars and other events which involved nearly 400 people working for independent TV and radio stations across the country. The participants of these seminars were journalists, cameramen, editors, managers, sales agents and those without a professional background. It was planned that Internews-Uzbekistan would gradually transfer its activities to the locally established Internyus NGO, which is already implementing two projects - "Reducing demand for drugs" and "Monitoring freedom of speech in Uzbekistan". "The implementation of these projects, which are important for the society and democracy building process in the country, has also been stopped," Anorboeva said.