Activists welcome ban on death penalty

Rights activists have welcomed an Uzbek government decision to abolish capital punishment while at the same time calling on Tashkent to impose an immediate moratorium on the execution of death row prisoners. "This is the first step on behalf of the [Uzbek] state with regard to the problem of the death penalty and I would like to thank the government for this move which heeded to appeals that the death penalty was against humanity," Tamara Chikunova, head of the Mothers Against Death Penalty and Torture, a local rights group advocating for the ban on capital punishment, said from the Uzbek capital, Tashkent, on Wednesday. "Until today even discussing the issue of the death penalty was forbidden in Uzbekistan," she added. Chikunova was not alone in her assessment. "This is a good step by the government but they should have started with a moratorium on the death penalty first," Surat Ikramov, head of another local rights organisation, the Initiative Group of Independent Rights Activists of Uzbekistan (IGIRAU), said. Amnesty International (AI), an international rights watchdog campaigning for the abolishment of capital punishment worldwide, echoed that sentiment, urging Tashkent to effectively stop the death penalty and executions. "While welcoming any step that leads to the abolition of the death penalty, Amnesty International urges the President of Uzbekistan to impose an immediate moratorium on death sentences and execution as a first step," Nicola Duckworth, AI's Europe and Central Asia programme director, said in a statement one day earlier. Their comments came after Uzbek President Islam Karimov signed a decree on Monday abolishing the death penalty in the Central Asian state from 1 January 2008 and replacing it with life and long-term imprisonment. But the issue of those who had already been sent to death row or might be until 1 January 2008 remained unclear under the decree, Chikunova warned, calling on such sentences to be converted to life imprisonment instead. The flawed criminal justice system in Uzbekistan - which along with Belarus are the last executioners in Europe and Central Asia - provides fertile ground for judicial error, AI claimed, adding that it had received credible allegations of unfair trials and widespread torture and ill-treatment, often to extract 'confessions'. "Neither death row prisoners nor their relatives are informed of the date of the execution in advance, denying them a last chance to say goodbye. The body of the prisoner is not given to relatives for burial and they are not informed of the place of burial," AI said. "Many people do not know that their kin had already been executed years earlier. We ask for transparency regarding everything related to the death penalty and executions," Chikunova added. Although statistics on the number of sentenced to death and executed had been kept secret in Central Asia's most populous country, Ikramov said that the number of prisoners sent to death row in the country could be up to 100. His colleague Chikunova noted that according to President Karimov the number of those executed in one year had been up to 60 people, but conceded that the actual number could be much higher. More than half of the countries in the world - namely 120 countries - have abolished the death penalty in law or practice. Three countries a year on average have abolished the death penalty in the past decade. "As long as the death penalty is maintained, the risk of executing the innocent can never be eliminated," Duckworth maintained.