Reports on the persecution and discrimination directed towards independent Muslims in Uzbekistan
For an overview of the human rights situation in Uzbekistan, see Reports: Overview of the Human Rights Situation
Title: Creating Enemies of the State: Religious Persecution in Uzbekistan
Organisation: Human Rights Watch
Date: March 2004
This report details the arrest and torture of detainees in a campaign that resulted in the incarceration of an estimated 7,000 Muslim dissidents. The government's targets were independent Muslims who practice their faith outside state-run mosques and madrassas or beyond the strict controls set out by the government's laws on religion.
Links: Download this report from the organisation’s website
Download this report from the Universal Jurisdiction archive
Title: From House to House: Abuses by Mahalla Committees
Organisation: Human Rights Watch
Date: September 2003
This report documents the role neighborhood, or mahalla, committees have played in three critical areas of government abuse: the government's six-year campaign against so-called Islamic fundamentalists; its response to domestic violence; and the 2000-2001 forced resettlement in southern Uzbekistan. The report calls on the government to ensure that mahalla committees stop discrimination and surveillance of independent Muslims; provide in-depth training of mahalla officials on the provision of protection to complainants in domestic violence cases; and facilitate, rather than block, access for international organisations and the media to resettlement villages.
Links: Download this report from the organisation’s website
Download this report from the Universal Jurisdiction archive
Title: Religious Persecution of Independent Muslims in Uzbekistan
Organisation: Human Rights Watch
Date: August 2002
This briefing paper describes how the government of Uzbekistan has violated the right to freedom of conscience by imprisoning and persecuting independent Muslims—Muslims whose peaceful practice of their faith falls beyond government controls. It describes arrests, trials, torture and other persecution of independent Muslims during the past year, as well as some of the cumulative effects of Uzbekistan’s five-year campaign against them.
Links: Download this report from the organisation’s website
Download this report from the Universal Jurisdiction archive
Title: "And it Was Hell All over Again...": Torture in Uzbekistan
Organisation: Human Rights Watch
Date: December 2000
This document reports that, in 2000, widespread torture of detainees was common in criminal investigations in Uzbekistan, and had become an unmistakable feature of the government's crackdown against independent Islam. It finds that Uzbekistan's government refused to hold police and security forces accountable for acts of torture and even tacitly encouraged torture though its broadcasting of political prisoners' public "confessions" as tools of political propaganda.
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Title: Class Dismissed: Discriminatory Expulsions of Muslim Students
Organisation: Human Rights Watch
Date: October 1999
This report documents a pernicious form of religious discrimination practised by the government against Muslims. It describes how schools and universities throughout Uzbekistan were closing their doors to Muslim men with beards and women in headscarves and how judges were presiding over blatantly unfair trials, ignoring police misdeeds and convicting men on the basis of their religious beliefs.
Link: Download this report from the organisation’s website
Title: Crackdown in the Farghona Valley: Arbitrary Arrests and Discrimination
Organisation: Human Rights Watch
Date: May 1998
This report describes the Uzbek government's policy of intolerance toward what it perceived as the primary threat to state stability - Muslims whom the government generally refers to as "Wahhabis" - as a travesty of the government's assertion that the stability born of repression is necessary to achieve democracy. The report finds that the human rights abuses committed during a crackdown in the Farghona Valley, an Islamic stronghold, that began intensively in early December 1997 were a natural outgrowth of the government's unchecked repression of what can loosely be referred to as "independent" Muslims or those who reject state-regulated Islam.
Link: Download this report from the organisation’s website
