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UZBEKISTAN-INTERNET-RIGHTS,LEAD
Blogger flees Uzbekistan after psychiatric detention
TASHKENT, Jan 20, 2020 (BSS/AFP) – A blogger from Uzbekistan who was held in a psychiatric facility after documenting a protest march said on Monday she had fled the ex-Soviet country under pressure from officials.
In a Facebook post, Nafosat Olloshkurova said leaving was a “necessary measure” and that officials had attempted to put her in a psychiatric facility again.
“I believe bloggers are unable to carry out their activities freely,” the 32-year-old wrote.
Tashkent-based human rights activist Abdurakhmon Tashanov said he and a member of the US diplomatic mission in Uzbekistan accompanied Olloshukurova to Tashkent airport.
The blogger boarded a flight for the Ukrainian capital Kiev, where Tashanov said she planned to appeal to the United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR).
Uzbekistan’s leader since 2016, Shavkat Mirziyoyev, has portrayed his country of 33 million people as opening up after nearly three decades of hardline rule under his former patron Islam Karimov.
Olloshkurova was detained in September after filming the march of a journalist from the northwestern Khorezm region to the capital Tashkent in order to appeal against charges he faced.
Olloshkurova was sentenced to administrative detention for petty hooliganism and violating strict laws on public assembly after police broke up the march.
Watchdog Amnesty International said that Olloshkurova was then placed in a psychiatric hospital in Urgench, western Uzbekistan and “subjected to medical treatment without her consent.”
Olloshkurova was released in late December but her case raised fears over backsliding in the reform-touting majority-Muslim country and earned condemnation from rights groups.
A state-led drive to peg back forced labour in the national cotton harvest and reforms boosting tourism and investment helped Uzbekistan become the Economist magazine’s “country of the year” last year.
But Olloshkurova’s case is one of several that have seen rights groups voice fears of a return to old ways.
In a high-profile case in December, retired diplomat Kadyr Yusupov was sentenced to five-and-a-half years in prison on espionage charges.
While Mirziyoyev has been lauded for doing away with many of Karimov’s authoritarian excesses, the first parliamentary elections under his rule in December lacked opposition parties and respect for fundamental rights, international observers said.
BSS/AFP/RY/1959 hrs