Rights groups: EU fails Uzbekistan's victims

World
Source Human Rights Watch

The European Union's decision today to lift the arms embargo against Uzbekistan despite its atrocious human rights record is an unconscionable abdication of responsibility toward Uzbek victims of abuse, Human Rights Watch, International Crisis Group, and Reporters Without Borders said today. The decision underscores the EU's lack of resolve in the face of Uzbekistan's intransigence and severely undermines its global standing and credibility as a principled promoter of human rights, the groups said. "With today's decision the EU has effectively abandoned the cause of human rights in Uzbekistan," said Holly Cartner, Europe and Central Asia director at Human Rights Watch. "The EU keeps reiterating its demands for human rights but then never actually holds Uzbekistan to those standards, making these demands ring hollow." EU ministers announced the decision to lift the embargo on arms sales during the monthly General Affairs and External Relations Council (GAERC), held in Luxembourg on October 26 and 27. The embargo was the last remaining portion of the EU's sanctions against Uzbekistan, imposed in response to the government massacre of hundreds of demonstrators, most of them unarmed, in the city of Andijan in May 2005 and the fierce crackdown on civil society that ensued. Citing what it termed "positive steps" taken by the Uzbek government, including its participation in structured human rights talks with the EU, ratification of international conventions prohibiting child labor, and release of some human rights defenders, the ministers justified the move as a means to "encourage the Uzbek authorities to take further substantive steps to improve the rule of law and the human rights situation on the ground." Human Rights Watch, International Crisis Group, and Reporters Without Borders said that apart from the dialogues, however, none of the steps characterized by EU ministers as "positive" had taken place during the year under review, which was marked by further deterioration in human rights.