Rights activist gets eight years in jail

A prominent Uzbek human rights activist has been sentenced to eight years in prison after being found guilty of “anti-government activity and receiving money from Western governments to disrupt public order”, a lawyer for the activist said on Tuesday. Mutabar Tojibayeva, head of the unregistered Ardent Hearts group in the eastern city of Fergana and a critic of the government, was convicted on Monday after a trial that was described by US-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) as “puppet theatre” that violated international standards on due legal process. “The hearing was a breach not only of international standards but also of Uzbek laws” Andrea Berg, HRW’s representative in Uzbekistan, who monitored the trial, told IRIN. “She wasn’t given a chance to meet her defence lawyers and the defence was not given a chance to cross-examine witnesses brought in the courtroom to testify against her,” she added. Prosecutors said Tojibayeva had received more than US $5,000 from the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and $200 from the French embassy that “was used to breach public order and for slander and fraud”. Tojibayeva, who has been on trial since 30 January, was found guilty of 13 charges, including threatening public order, fraud, appropriation of property and blackmailing local businessmen. The trial was held in a small town in Tashkent province, some 70 km south of the capital. She was arrested on 7 October 2005, a day before she was due to leave for an international rights conference in the Irish capital, Dublin. “We view Tojibayeva’s conviction as part of a pattern of persecution against independent voices and critics within civil society since the Andijan massacre,” said Holly Cartner, Europe and Central Asia director of HRW, in a statement. “The ferocity of this pattern is unprecedented, even when judged against Uzbekistan’s 14-year history of repression since independence from the Soviet Union,” she said. Tojibayeva is one of dozens of rights defenders and independent journalists who were arrested or have fled the country following a government crackdown on dissent after the Andijan bloodshed, where up to 1,000 people were killed by security forces last May, according to rights groups. Tashkent puts the death toll at 187, vehemently denying all requests for an independent international inquiry. The United Nations, the European Union (EU) and the United States have criticised Uzbekistan for its handling of the unrest and its subsequent convictions on "terrorism" charges of more than 150 civilians allegedly involved, most of them in closed trials.