Marius Fossum, the Committee’s Regional Representative in Central Asia. Photo from the NHC website
Fergana has learned that the website of the international human rights organisation Norwegian Helsinki Committee is no longer accessible from Uzbekistan. The site remains available in Russia and other countries around the world. It is currently unclear whether this is the result of a technical problem or whether the site has been intentionally blocked by service providers.
As the Geneva-based senior adviser to the committee Ivar Dale related to Fergana agency, the Committee’s staff noticed on Wednesday that the site could no longer be accessed from Tashkent. “This was discovered by our regional representative for Central Asia Marius Fossum, who recently visited Uzbekistan,” Dale explained.
“I checked with journalists who are also in Uzbekistan, and they say the same,” he said. “The site does not seem to open on computer or mobile, while it works normally in neighboring countries such as Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan.”
Fergana also asked its correspondents to check access to the NHC’s website from various cities around Uzbekistan – none of them were able to open the page.
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.
