Surat Ikramov

Surat Ikramov (born in 1945) is an Uzbek human rights activist and a prominent critic of Uzbekistan’s authoritarian government. Ikramov is the chairman of the Initiative Group of Independent Human Rights Defenders. Since its founding in 2002, the group has become one of the most prolific chroniclers of human rights abuses in Uzbekistan, Central Asia's most populous state and an important Western ally in the Afghanistan war.

In 2003, Ikramov was kidnapped, severely beaten, bound in a sack, and thrown in a secluded ditch. Given his background, Human Rights Watch said "we suspect that there may be more to this incident than mere criminal thuggery." Ikramov regularly attends trials, talks to victims and compiles dispatches which he emails to diplomats, journalists and government officials. In a country with no independent media, his dispatches provide a rare window into the workings of Uzbekistan's repressive legal and political system. An archive of his dispatches is available at www.ignpu.net.

Much of Ikramov's work has focused on exposing mistreatment, alleged fabrication of evidence, and torture of detainees, particularly those accused of religious extremism. An engineer by training, Ikramov became a human rights defender by accident. In the 1990s, he set up a small printing business, and when a state-owned factory broke his equipment, he sued and lost. He got in touch with other human-rights defenders, and eventually became one himself. Ikramov is unstinting in his criticism of the ruling regime of longtime President Islam Karimov. In a May dispatch marking the five-year anniversary of a government crackdown on protesters in Andijan, Ikramov called it "one of the most horrible crimes of the Karimov regime" that remains "uninvestigated and unpunished." The government claims it was fighting terrorists.

Ikramov was recently sued in a case involving a suspicious death of a famous Uzbek singer. According to the official version, she hanged herself. But Ikramov suggested she may have been murdered, and implicated the relatives of the singer's boyfriend, who is a brother of Uzbekistan's interior minister. A court recently ruled against Ikramov, and ordered him to pay a fine to the plaintiffs. Ikramov is appealing.