Prisoners of the most cruel colony in Uzbekistan - Jaslyk, known for boiling prisoners to death. CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 Uznews.net / Flickr. Some rights reserved.This article has been translated from the Fergana.News information agency, a leading source of information on Central Asia.
Over the last 15 years hardly a day has gone by without our editorial team receiving reports of harsh court sentences, torture and physical abuse in Uzbek prison camps, as well as the unjustified extension of sentences and complaints from prisoners’ families who have sent hopeful letters about their misfortunes to state agencies. This situation has not changed in years, and all the representations of human rights campaigners and appeals to officials remain unanswered. Aggressive interrogation, unfair trials and torture in prisons are endemic and, indeed, central to Uzbekistan’s law enforcement system.
The first person to report on the “systematic” and “widespread” use of torture in the country was the Dutch legal specialist Theo van Boven, who from 2001 to 2004 was the UN’s Special Rapporteur on Torture. He visited Uzbekistan at the end of 2002 and immediately encountered problems in monitoring the workings of its law enforcement and penal system.
