Amnesty calls for moratorium on death sentence

Amnesty International (AI) has called for a moratorium on the death sentence in Uzbekistan, the only country in Central Asia that still practices capital punishment. "Uzbekistan should follow the example of its Central Asian neighbours and fundamentally review its policy on the death penalty," Anna Sunder-Plassman, a researcher for the watchdog group, told IRIN on Monday from London. Tashkent needed to take significant steps towards the abolishment of the death penalty; an important one being the prompt moratorium on death sentences and executions, Sunder-Plassman explained, calling for all pending death sentences to be commuted and the veil of secrecy surrounding their application lifted. "Conditions on death row in Uzbekistan fall far short of international standards," she maintained, citing allegations of beatings and the denial of outdoor exercise privileges. Many death row prisoners never even knew the date of their execution in advance, she claimed. "Many death row prisoners have reported [that] whenever the door to their cell is opened they never know whether they would be led to their execution," the activist said. Uzbekistan, Central Asia's most populous state, had executed at least 14 death row prisoners, despite interventions by the United Nations Human Rights Committee that had requested a stay of execution while the Committee examined allegations that serious human rights violations had taken place in their cases. Her comments coincide with a new report released by the group the same day entitled Belarus/Uzbekistan: The last executioners. The two countries are the last two states of the former Soviet Union where the death sentence is still pronounced and executed. "The criminal judicial system in both countries is flawed and provides ample opportunities for judicial error," a statement by the group said on Monday, noting that they routinely received credible allegations of unfair trials, torture and ill treatment, often to extract "confessions". Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, initially all of the new republics retained the death penalty, but thanks to a strong trend towards its abolishment in the region, Belarus and Uzbekistan remained the only two countries to still carry such executions out. "There is now a realistic chance that Europe and Central Asia could be a death penalty-free zone in the very near future," Sunder-Plassman pointed out. She could be right. Amongst the former Soviet Union, nine countries have abolished the death penalty, including Armenia, Azerbaijan, Estonia, Georgia, Lithuania, Latvia, Moldovia, Turkmenistan and Ukraine. Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan and the internationally unrecognised regions of Abkhazia [a breakaway region in Georgia], the Dnestr Moldovian Republic, Nagorno-Karabakh and South Ossetia have introduced a moratorium.