22.07.2006

Amnesty International

Europe and Central Asia: Summary of Amnesty International's Concerns in the Region: July – December 2005

KYRGYZSTAN

This country entry has been extracted from a forthcoming Amnesty International (AI) report, Europe and Central Asia: Summary of Amnesty International's Concerns in the Region: July – December 2005 (AI Index: EUR 01/007/2006), to be issued in June 2006. Anyone wanting further information on other AI concerns in Europe and Central Asia should consult the full document.

Prison riots
More than 20 inmates were killed in widespread prison riots, which were reportedly in response to harsh prison conditions and collusion between prison authorities and jailed criminal leaders. Tynychbek Akmatbaev, a member of parliament (MP), two of his assistants, and Ikmatullo Polotov, a senior prisons official, were killed while visiting one of these prisons on 20 October. Demonstrators in Bishkek, led by the MP’s brother, Ryspek Atmakbaev, who was awaiting trial on murder charges in a separate case, accused Prime Minister Feliks Kulov of complicity in the deaths but were called off a week later after President Kurmanbek Bakiev agreed to meet a delegation. On 1 November more violence erupted when government forces tried to regain control of prisons left without guards and administrators following the October riots.

Death penalty

On 29 December President Kurmanbek Bakiev signed a decree extending the moratorium on executions until the full abolition of the death penalty in law. The same decree instructed the government to prepare within two months legislative proposals aiming at Kyrgyzstan’s accession to the Second Optional Protocol of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the complete abolition of the death penalty, the introduction of life imprisonment and the commutation of all existing death sentences to life or long-term imprisonment. The decree also asked the government to take measures to improve the conditions of detention on death row and invited the Ministry of Justice, the Ombudsman and the Presidential Human Rights Commission to conduct monitoring of conditions on death row together with representatives of non-governmental organizations.

Draft amendments to the Constitution proposed by the President in November also included the permanent and full abolition of the death penalty.
Refugees from Uzbekistan at risk (update to AI Index: EUR 01/012/2005)

The authorities in Kyrgyzstan continued to be under great pressure from the Uzbekistani authorities to extradite a large number of the more than 500 refugees who had fled Andizhan on 13 May and had been given shelter in a camp in Besh-Kana. There was concern that the government was failing in its obligations adequately to ensure the rights of these refugees to international protection and safety.

On 29 July, the office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) secured the evacuation of 439 Uzbekistani refugees, who were airlifted out of Kyrgyzstan to a temporary centre in Romania. Some of these refugees were resettled to third countries while others were awaiting resettlement in countries that had offered them permanent protection.
Extraditions and threat of forcible return

On 9 June, the authorities in Kyrgyzstan had forcibly returned four of the refugees from the Besh-Kana camp to Uzbekistan. Despite concerted efforts by the UN, it was not possible to establish the whereabouts of Dilshod Gadzhiev, Tavakkal Gadzhiev, Muhammad Kadirov and Abdugais (Gasan) Shakirov. At least one of the men was reportedly severely tortured in Uzbekistan, and at least one, Tavakkal Gadzhiev, was sentenced to 17 years in prison in November following an unfair trial for his alleged participation in the Andizhan events.
There was particular concern about the threat of forcible return by the authorities of Kyrgyzstan of 29 refugees – including some of the entrepreneurs who had been on trial in Andizhan at the beginning of May – who were transferred from the camp into detention in June. Fourteen of the 29 were evacuated to Romania for resettlement in July and a further 11 were resettled in Belgium, Finland and the Netherlands in September, after the authorities in Kyrgyzstan determined that they were refugees.

The status of the remaining four men, Zhakhongir Maksudov, Odilzhon Rakhimov, Yakub Toshboev and Rasulzhon Pirmatov, in detention in Osh, remained disputed. The Uzbekistani authorities claimed that one of them had been convicted of narcotics offences and that the other three were sought in connection with the violent death of the city prosecutor in Andizhan on 13 May, a charge they denied. UNHCR recognized one of the four as a refugee and started the process of determining the refugee status of the other three men, whom the refugee agency considered asylum-seekers. The authorities contested UNHCR’s decision to recognize one as a refugee and initially excluded the other three men from seeking asylum. The men appealed against this decision. Their appeal was upheld in a court in Kyrgyzstan on 18 August, which referred the cases back for reconsideration. They were subsequently recognized by UNHCR and eventually the authorities as refugees. On 13 December the Bishkek City Court ruled that the men should be extradited back to Uzbekistan. The men’s appeal against this decision was pending with the Supreme Court of Kyrgyzstan at the end of the year.

Access to asylum procedures

There was concern at the lack of access to asylum procedures for individuals or families who crossed the border in other places and/or at other times after 13-14 May in search of international protection. Local human rights activists estimated that hundreds of people who fled Andizhan were hiding in Kyrgyzstan, either staying with relatives or acquaintances or living under assumed names with no proper registration, thus increasing their vulnerability. Effective opportunities for asylum-seekers to legalize their presence in Kyrgyzstan did not exist. Little or no information was readily accessible to them to explain the rights of an asylum-seeker, or how to lodge an asylum claim. Although UNHCR was able to register asylum claims independently, they did not consider this to be “effective protection” for refugees. According to reports, some of the Uzbekistani nationals seeking asylum and protection had been denied entry to Kyrgyzstan or had been returned to Uzbekistan. There were fears that the authorities were effectively not in a position to provide refugees physical protection from the Uzbekistani government forces they were fleeing, including protection from forcible return to Uzbekistan (see AI Index: EUR 58/016/2005).

Failure to act  to protect nationals of Kyrgyzstan

As many as 50 Kyrgyzstani men, in Andizhan for professional or private reasons, fled with the refugees after 13 May. However, in Kyrgyzstan they were put in the Teshik Tosh refugee camp; no notification was sent to their families, and there was no record of their arrival in search of protection or of their protection needs. The camp authorities transferred them directly to a temporary detention centre, where they were held for up to 15 days on administrative charges.

Families reported that law enforcement officers systematically extorted large sums of money from them to visit their relatives in the camp or to have them released from the camp or from detention. The details of 37 out of the 50 men were included in the list of wanted criminal suspects published by the Uzbekistan authorities in June. AI learned in July from a source in the Osh City Department of Internal Affairs that the Andizhan prosecutor’s office had extended its warrant to a further five men, totalling 42 in all. To avoid being seized and forcibly transferred to Uzbekistan, those on the list went into hiding.

On 26 July the Prosecutor of Osh told the newspaper Vecherny Bishkek (Evening Bishkek) that no Kyrgyzstani citizens on the “wanted list” would be handed over to Uzbekistan and that any prosecutions of them arising from the events in Andizhan would take place in Kyrgyzstan.

The relatives of four young men from Kyrgyzstan who went missing after the Andizhan events on 13 May told AI that they had asked the local authorities in Osh for information about their whereabouts. Two days later a car with Uzbekistani number plates drove up to their house after dark and well-built men who presented no identification papers, or legal warrant, asked them questions about every member of their household. The family concluded they were being interviewed by members of the Uzbekistani National Security Service (SNB).
On 13 July the Governor of Osh Region, Anvar Artikov, told international news agencies that he was unaware of any activity by Uzbekistani law enforcement officials on the territory of Kyrgyzstan. However, an unofficial report given to AI by a usually reliable source suggested that the Uzbekistani SNB were occupying premises at the time within the building of the Osh regional prosecutor’s office.