TASHKENT, JULY 5 2017 (The Bulletin) — Taking its era of openness to new heights, the Uzbek government said it may allow Human Rights Watch to re-open its office in Tashkent, six years after it was effectively expelled.
The BBC has also posted an advert for an Uzbek language journalist to be based in Tashkent, suggesting that it too was also preparing the ground for a return to Uzbekistan.
In comments reported by official media, Uzbek foreign minister Abdulaziz Kamilov said: “Our cooperation with Human Rights Watch underwent something of a pause, some time in 2010. But this does not mean that we have definitively suspended relations or that we do not want to cooperate.”
The human rights lobby was told to leave Uzbekistan in 2011. The BBC and other media had been thrown out of the country six years earlier after reporting on the deaths of hundreds of people in the town of Adijan after government soldiers opened fire.
Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoyev has looked to open up the country since taking over as president in September 2016, promising to give ordinary Uzbeks more freedom.
ENDS
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(News report from Issue No. 336, published on July 16 2017)