Ministry of Internal Affairs of Uzbekistan reacted to ACCA publication concerning prisoners’ situation
The press service of the Main Directorate for the Execution of Sentences under the Ministry of Internal Affairs published an informational message under the headline “Opinion on the article posted on the Acca.media website” in response to the ACCA publication concerning the situation in colony No.6.
Earlier, ACCA published letters of prisoners from the colony in Namangan region of Uzbekistan, in which they spoke of systematic bullying that forced prisoners to commit suicide.
The Ministry of Internal Affairs of Uzbekistan in its report states that “in institutions of the penal system of this kind, such facts are inadmissible. All necessary measures have been identified to prevent violations of the rights and freedoms of convicts passing the sentence, and to prevent among them any kind of extortion, humiliation, pressure, etc.”
The ACCA editorial staff thanks the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Uzbekistan for the timely response and recommends that the punishment service more thoroughly verify the facts that were given in the letters of the prisoners. We inform the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Uzbekistan that such complaints from places of detention are published by our editorial office regularly. We wrote about the beatings in the penal colony No.7 in Bostanlyk district of Tashkent region, about the practice of torture in the penal colony No.64/4 in Kyzyl-Tep. The press service didn’t respond to the publication about how the administration of the penal colony No.42 (Zangiata district of Tashkent region) forces female prisoners to go to pick cotton. The General Directorate for the Execution of Sentences also ignored the facts of cruel treatment of young detainees in the investigative isolation ward No.1, otherwise known as Tashturma, in order to break them physically and morally.
We hope that the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Uzbekistan will begin a large-scale verification in places of detention on all published facts and the perpetrators will be justly punished.
The message of the press service of the General Directorate for the Execution of Sentences under the Ministry of Internal Affairs was commented by the president of the Association “Human Rights in Central Asia” (France) Nadezhda Ataeva. “The response of the press service of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Uzbekistan is a formal reply and another eloquent example of the fact that prisoners in this country are limited in their right to adequate medical care. This explains the practice of losing information about the real causes of death among prisoners and statistics.”
