Little progress in the position of women - OSCE

There has been little progress on women’s rights over the past two years in Uzbekistan, according to an official with the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). “There have been no changes over the past couple of years,” Per Normark, human dimension officer with OSCE, told IRIN from the Uzbek capital, Tashkent, on Thursday, calling for further protection for women. “They [the authorities] have been drafting a law on equal opportunities for a long time but it hasn’t been adopted yet.” Normark expressed concern over the overall state of human rights in Central Asian’s most populous country, noting the poor situation of women’s rights. “Women’s rights in particular are a problem, where everything needs to be improved basically,” he asserted. His comments follow an ongoing four-day training course organised by the OSCE, which started on Tuesday, geared towards Uzbek women working in NGOs and governmental officials. The initiative aims at increasing the capacities of 22 Uzbek women working in local NGOs, including two state officials, on human and women’s rights monitoring and reporting. “We are targeting young women in particular, providing them with a mix of human and women’s rights [knowledge],” the OSCE official said, explaining that the workshop has been part of the ongoing Human Rights Education programme in the country. In a previous event, held in 2003, heads of NGOs participated in a training course focused on issues of human rights, reporting on women’s rights and violence against women. Despite some progress made in areas such as social welfare, domestic violence remains a serious problem in the former Soviet republic, according to Human Rights Watch (HRW), with the authorities yet to have to implement any legislation to protect women from violence Though there are no statistics on levels of gender violence, it is believed that the number is rising. Muiasser Maksudove, of the NGO Women’s Resource Centre, told IRIN from Tashkent that the rate of violence against women in the home was rising. This was partly due to increasing poverty and partly due to a national regression towards ‘traditional’ family values that did not recognise women’s rights, she said. All evidence suggests that domestic violence is a markedly under-reported crime. Of 20 women victims of domestic violence interviewed by HRW for a July 2001 study, only six had gone to the police. Of those six, in two cases the perpetrators paid fines, and in one case the perpetrator served just 15 days in jail. None of the cases resulted in criminal charges being filed. In addition, the OSCE official said that NGOs operating in Uzbekistan were facing several handicaps hindering their daily activity. Everything from administrative problems for NGOs in general to a lack of sensitivity when it came to women NGOs in particular, he added. When asked what needed to be done in order to provide women with more protection, he answered that a lot of training for Uzbek men was needed. “They need a lot of training to understand the situation, the problem and the benefits the whole society would have by introducing more equal standards,” he said.