Senior adviser of the Norwegian Helsinki Committee Ivar Dale. Photo from NHC’s website
Fergana has learned that, as of the morning of Sunday 8 December, the website of the international human rights organisation the Norwegian Helsinki Committee, previously temporarily inaccessible in Uzbekistan, is once again open to the public.
Problems with access to the site are no longer reported from a number of cities around Uzbekistan. It can be opened both on computers and on mobile phones.
Fergana’s sources close to the country’s government called the temporary lack of access to the NHC’s homepage a “technical error”.
No official declaration from the Uzbek authorities on the matter has been made.
Commenting on the incident, senior adviser of the committee Ivar Dale told Fergana: “We are happy to hear that the website of the Norwegian Helsinki Committee was blocked only for technical reasons and not as a result of intentional censorship. We hope that the time when the websites of several foreign news agencies and international human rights organizations were inaccessible in Uzbekistan is a thing of the past. We also hope that other websites currently unavailable, such as RFE/RL, are made accessible as soon as possible.” (At the start of 2019 the Uzbek government allowed access to a number of previously blocked internet media sites, including Fergana but not Radio Liberty’s Uzbek website).
Employees at the organisation realised that their site was inaccessible from Tashkent on Wednesday earlier this week. “This was discovered by our regional representative for Central Asia Marius Fossum, who recently visited Uzbekistan,” said Dale.
▪ The Norwegian Helsinki Committee was formed in the 1970s to support the struggle for human rights in the Soviet Union (and later in the countries of the former USSR) and Eastern Europe. In 2019, together with other organisations, the committee came out in support of the Uzbek human rights defenders Agzam Turgunov and Dilmurod Saidov. It also called for an investigation into the alleged torture of former attorney general Rashid Kadyrov.
