OCT. 20 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – Uzbek cinemas have been showing a carefully scripted film depicting how the life of the ordinary peasant is happier than those people seeking to emulate Western values in the city, the eurasianet.org website reported. Human rights workers accuse Uzbek officials of using propaganda to control people.
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(News report from Issue No. 205, published on Oct. 22 2014)
OCT. 20 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – Playing the role of the great benevolent master, Tajik president Emomali Rakhmon granted amnesty to 10,000 prisoners in Tajikistan to mark the 20th anniversary of the country’s constitution. Mr Rakhmon, president since the mid-1990s, regularly uses amnesties to relieve over-crowding in prisons which human rights groups criticise.
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(News report from Issue No. 205, published on Oct. 22 2014)
OCT. 15 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – The Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), a sort of best-practise benchmark for countries heavily involved in mining or oil production, told Azerbaijan that it needs to undergo a compliance check five months earlier than planned.
EITI chief Clare Short, a former British minister, said that concerns over Azerbaijan’s recent crackdown on civil society had triggered the compliance check.
“The situation facing civil society in Azerbaijan is clearly problematic,” Ms Short wrote in a statement.
“The Board discussed the findings of the fact finding mission and expressed deep concern. The Board hopes that Azerbaijan will open up more space for civil society to make its essential contribution to the EITI as laid down in our Standard.”
International pressure has been increasing on Azerbaijan over its treatment of opposition activists and human rights defenders. The EITI’s statement will be particularly irritating to Azerbaijan, though, as it has previously touted its links to EITI as evidence of its good intentions.
Being ordered to undergo a compliance check before 2015 will be publicly humiliating.
And there is some evidence that the pressure on Azerbaijan is beginning to tell. On Oct. 17, President Ilham Aliyev released four opposition activists as part of a wider amnesty.
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(News report from Issue No. 205, published on Oct. 22 2014)
OCT. 17 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – London-based Amnesty International said it had present a petition with 200,000 signatures calling for the release of dozens of so-called prisoners of conscience in Uzbekistan. Human rights activists say Uzbekistan has one of the worst records in the world.
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(News report from Issue No. 205, published on Oct. 22 2014)
OCT. 9 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – Tesco, the world’s second largest retailer, has signed up to an agreement not to buy cotton from Uzbekistan because of concerns over its use of child labour to pick it, media reported.
The timing will particularly hurt Uzbekistan as Tesco’s move comes on the eve of the annual Uzbekistan cotton trade show on Oct. 14. This set piece event is supposed to showcase Uzbek cotton — one of the country’s biggest exports.
The problem for Uzbekistan is that its use of deploying school children, teachers and doctors to harvest the cotton has made buying it taboo.
“Markets for Uzbek cotton sourced with forced labour continue to diminish as consumers become more aware of the egregious human rights violations that occur during the Uzbek cotton harvest, with over 4m Uzbek citizens forced to pick cotton under threat of penalty,” the advocacy group Responsible Source Network (RSN) said on its website after announcing that Tesco had agreed to support it.
To an extent, RSN is correct. More and more Western retailers are looking to stop buying clothes made with Uzbek cotton. Uzbekistan last year also allowed the United Nation’s International Labour organisation (ILO) to tour the country at harvest season and inspect reports of child labour.
It’s likely, campaigners have said, that child labour is still used in Uzbekistan but this has been reduced over the past few years.
And, there is a flip side. With Western companies trying to stop using Uzbek cotton, Uzbekistan has looked east to potential clients who are less squeamish about human rights. Bangladesh has become a key importer of Uzbek cotton.
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(News report from Issue No. 204, published on Oct. 15 2014)
OCT. 7 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – Azerbaijan’s inaugural Formula 1 race in 2016 will take place through the streets of Baku, Formula 1 boss Bernie Ecclestone said.The race is controversial because of Azerbaijan’s crackdown on human rights. For Azerbaijan, though, it represents a great PR coup.
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(News report from Issue No. 203, published on Oct. 8 2014)
OCT. 6 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – Uzbek president Islam Karimov will visit Prague next year, the head of the Czech presidential administration told media. Mr Karimov had cancelled a trip to Prague earlier this year after Czech ministers, worried about Uzbekistan’s human rights record, refused to meet him.
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(News report from Issue No. 203, published on Oct. 8 2014)
SEPT. 26 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – Torture in Uzbek prisons is still endemic, the New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) said in a new report. Out of 44 former and current prisoners interviewed for the report, HRW said that 29 were tortured. Uzbekistan has said it is eliminating torture from its prisons and that officers who beat inmates are prosecuted.
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(News report from Issue No. 202, published on Oct. 1 2014)
SEPT. 30 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – Jailed Azerbaijani human rights activist and government critic Anar Mammadli has won the prestigious Vaclav Havel Prize from the Council of Europe. Mammadli is the director of the Baku-based Election Monitoring and Democracy Studies Center. He was imprisoned last year for tax evasion.
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(News report from Issue No. 202, published on Oct. 1 2014)
SEPT. 30 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – Doctors and nurses are being forced to work in fields picking the cotton harvest this year, various media have reported quoting human rights workers. Uzbekistan has come under increased criticism for using forced labour to pick its cotton harvest each year. The Uzbek government has not responded.
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(News report from Issue No. 202, published on Oct. 1 2014)
