Elena Urlaeva temporarily detained and abused
On 31 May 2015, human rights defender Ms Elena Urlaeva was detained by police and subjected to violence after interviewing and photographing teachers and medical staff forced by Uzbek district authorities to work in cotton fields.
Elena Urlaeva is the Head of the Human Rights Defenders Alliance of Uzbekistan and organises public demonstrations for the right to freedom of association and assembly. She also communicates with victims of human rights violations on an individual basis, partly due to the lack of human rights organisations in the region. Recently, Elena Urlaeva has been monitoring cases of the subjection of Uzbek civil servants and students to forced labour. The evidence gathered by her and her colleagues, at the Human Rights Defenders Alliance of Uzbekistan reveal a widespread and systematic state policy of forcing citizens to weed cotton fields in several regions of Uzbekistan.
On 31 May 2015, human rights defender Ms Elena Urlaeva was detained by police and subjected to violence after interviewing and photographing teachers and medical staff forced by Uzbek district authorities to work in cotton fields.
Recently, Urlaeva has been monitoring cases of the subjection of Uzbek civil servants and students to forced labour. The evidence gathered by her and her colleagues reveals a widespread and systematic state policy of forcing citizens to weed cotton fields in several regions of Uzbekistan.
On 31 May 2015, Elena Urlaeva was detained for approximately 11 hours by local police in the town of Chinaz, 60 kilometers south-west of Tashkent. She was arrested in the early morning of the same day immediately after she had met civil servants waiting to be picked up for work in the cotton fields. She had conducted interviews and taken pictures of teachers working at two schools and a nursery, as well as of 60 staff members from the central hospital, alongside representatives of the local authorities and health department who were present.
During her detention police confiscated Urlaeva's camera and notes. Police then searched for her flash drive which contained the photographs the human rights defender had taken earlier on the same day as evidence of the forced labour in practice. During the proceedings at the police station, which included vaginal and rectal cavity searches, Urlaeva was forcibly held by male police officers, while paramedics searched for the USB drive. Being unable to locate the drive, the police brought the human rights defender to a hospital where she underwent two X-rays of her chest and stomach, as police assumed that she had swallowed the flash drive.
Further to the humiliating searches, the human rights defender was subjected to interrogation by the first deputy chief of District Department of Internal Affairs and his colleagues. She was insulted, physically mistreated and threatened with violence against her, her family and the network of human rights defenders she works with, as well as with the online posting of nude images that had been taken of her while she was detained.
