Tashkent, May 04: A controversial meeting of the EBRD, the development bank for eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, opened on Sunday in the Uzbek capital amid tight security with concerns about human rights to the fore. Police photographed some 30 citizens demonstrating outside the luxury hotel hosting the meeting of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.

While officials present the meeting as an endorsement of their political and economic policies, human rights activists have condemned it as inappropriate in a state where the United Nations says torture is systemic.
"On March 1 I had a meeting with the British ambassador and a member of the Foreign Office. Later that night my grandson, a 20-year-old boy, was killed and his body was thrown in front of his father's house," one ethnic Tajik human rights activist said at a panel discussion at the meeting.

Human rights bodies say an estimated 6,500 political prisoners languish in Uzbek jails, most of them accused of "fomenting Muslim extremism," and many are tortured.
"We welcome the fact that these protesters were allowed, but we cannot exclude the possibility that they will be arrested after the event," an official from an Uzbek nongovernmental organization told another panel debate.
The EBRD is unique among international financial institutions in that, as well as insisting on economic reforms as a condition of its loans, which total 21.6 billion euros ($24.3 billion) over the past 12 years in 27 countries, it demands democratic reforms from borrower states. Bureau Report