Uzbekistan: 2,000 prisoners were down with COVID-19
The fatal outcome was avoided, but 2,000 prisoners were infected with COVID-19. This was announced by the head of the department for organization of medical and preventive care of the Main Directorate for the Execution of Punishment under the Ministry of Internal Affairs, Bakhodir Yusupov.
According to him, “all convicts with moderate and severe forms of COVID-19 are in specialized hospitals.” The speaker assured that “prisoners with a mild or completely asymptomatic form of the disease” are also under the care of doctors of medical institutions of the Main Directorate for the Execution of Punishment.
ACCA previously reported on how prisoners in Uzbekistan are massively infected with COVID-19.
The spread of the disease was facilitated by the irresponsible behavior of employees of the country’s penitentiary system. Since the quarantine began in March, they have neglected basic safety precautions. Only on May 22, the government assessed the alarming situation. It adopted the decree “On additional measures to ensure openness and transparency of the activities of the internal affairs bodies in the field of the execution of sentences related to imprisonment”, when the disease had already become widespread. The Ministry of Internal Affairs took several months to disclose information on the number of prisoners and carriers of coronavirus infection.
The document obliges the Ministry of Internal Affairs to make public information about the death and state of health of persons held in penal institutions and pre-trial detention centers. In practice, the classification of information about the number of prisoners, who became infected or died from COVID-19, continued. Only three months later, these data are no longer a secret, and the government decided to create a quarantine zone in Angren (Tashkent region) for 3,000 prisoners. This fact already casts doubt on the information of Bakhodir Yusupov.
As ACCA previously wrote, more than 22,000 people in the country are serving sentences in colonies and prisons. There are 54 penitentiary institutions in Uzbekistan: 18 – closed, 25 – address colonies and 11 – pre-trial detention centers. According to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, more than 7,000 of 22,000 convicts are serving their sentences in settlements, and 14,000 – in closed-type colonies. Those serving sentences are still deprived of the opportunity to contact their relatives by phone. Thus, the Ministry of Internal Affairs seeks to prevent the spread of information about the situation in places of detention.
The information that the prisoners were allowed to communicate with relatives via Zoom, Skype and other various methods of video conferencing turned out to be unreliable. This was announced by the Deputy Head of the Department for Educational and Public Works of the Main Directorate for the Execution of Punishment, Jamshid Sultanov, at the briefing at the Agency of Information and Mass Communications.
Tatiana Dovlatova, leader of the initiative group “Open line”, also confirmed this information.
“I called two officers of the Main Directorate for the Execution of Punishment,” Dovlatova said in an interview with ACCA. “They tried to avoid answering the question: how does it work and where is the connection for the prisoners. It turns out that now only tests are underway and only in one women’s colony, where, by the way, Gulnara Karimova is serving her term.”
