Nosir Zokirov, a correspondent for the Uzbek service of the US government-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), was released from prison on Sunday after serving a six-month sentence for insulting a security officer, the broadcaster reported.
Zokirov, 55, a veteran RFE/RL correspondent in the eastern city of Namangan, was detained, tried without counsel or witnesses, sentenced, and imprisoned all on August 26, 2005. He was tried under Article 140 of Uzbekistan's criminal code, which makes insulting a member of the security services punishable by prison.
The charge stemmed from an August 6, 2005 phone conversation with a National Security Service agent in which Zokirov protested pressure that agents had put on poet Khaidarali Komilov. In a RFE/RL interview with Zokirov that month, Komilov had criticised Uzbek authorities for violently cracking down on antigovernment demonstrators in the city of Andijan in May. Government troops killed hundreds of demonstrators on May 13, 2005, according to independent accounts.
After his release, Zokirov told RFE/RL that he was not mistreated in prison but felt "isolated" and could not receive any information about his family and colleagues.
"The government crackdown on independent journalists has created an information vacuum in Uzbekistan," Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) Executive Director Ann Cooper said. "While we are relieved that our colleague Nosir Zokirov is released, we're appalled at the politicised use of Uzbek courts to muzzle reporters. Zokirov should not have served a day in prison."
"We are relieved at the release of Nosir Zokirov, wrongly convicted and thrown in prison when he was only doing his job of informing the public," Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) said. "He was given no opportunity of defending himself at his trial, the verdict of which was a foregone conclusion. Unfortunately we cannot rejoice at his release because the journalist has served his entire sentence and the courts did not listen to his appeals for leniency," RSF added.
Uzbek authorities denied accreditation to RFE/RL in December, effectively silencing the last independent broadcaster reporting in the country. The Foreign Ministry refused to renew accreditation for the agency's Tashkent bureau and withdrew the press cards of its correspondents in Uzbekistan. Two other news organisations, BBC and the Institute for War & Peace Reporting (IWPR), were forced to close their bureaus in Uzbekistan last year due to government harassment. Numerous journalists were arrested and detained for brief periods in the crackdown following the Andijan massacre.
According to RSF, three journalists have been in prison since 1999, two of them, Jusuf Ruzimuradov and Mohammed Bekjanov accused of belonging to a terrorist organisation because they wrote for opposition newspaper, Erk. The third, Sabirjon Yakubov, of the independent weekly Hurriyat (Freedom), has been detained since April 2005 for a simple press offence.
Earlier last month, a civil court in Tashkent, rejected Freedom House's final appeal of a six-month suspension of its activities in the country. The organisaiotn has had to suspend its activities in the increasingly repressive country until July 2006.
The appeal was a final attempt to maintain Freedom House programmes in Uzbekistan following a January 11, 2006, decision from the Uzbek Ministry of Justice claiming that the office was in violation of Uzbek legislation governing nongovernmental organisations' (NGO) operations. Freedom House, an independent NGO that supports the expansion of freedom in the world, has monitored rights in Uzbekistan since independence in 1991, and has been working with human rights defenders in the country since 2002.
The charges included offering free internet access to Uzbek citizens and hosting unregistered organisations, including human rights defenders and political parties, at Freedom House events. Uzbek prosecutors had also alleged noncompliance with a secret decree issued by the government, which throughout the proceedings remained undisclosed.
"It is clear from the Ministry of Justice's actions that the Uzbek government has no intention of tolerating international NGOs whose purpose is to circulate information about how genuine democratic societies operate," said Jennifer Windsor, Executive Director at Freedom House said in a statement. "This decision is the most recent in a series of deliberate actions by the Karimov government to isolate human rights activists within Uzbekistan from their supporters in the international community."
Harassment of individual Uzbeks, local organisations and international NGOs promoting human rights by Uzbek authorities has escalated since the Andijan violence. Approximately 200 domestic organisations have been forced to close down or leave the country, as have numerous international NGOs, including IREX, Internews, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and the Open Society Institute.
This year, as a result of state violence against peaceful demonstrators, repression of Uzbek civil society, and an overall decline in human rights conditions, Freedom House downgraded Uzbekistan's score in its annual survey, Freedom in the World. Uzbekistan is now considered to be among the ranks of the world's most repressive regimes.
