Tashkent human rights activist Abdullo Tojiboy-ugli is having to endure below-freezing temperatures in his home.

	In 2007 Abdullo-Tojiboy ugli announced he would stand in Uzbekistan’s presidential elections

Tashkent human rights activist Abdullo Tojiboy-ugli is having to endure below-freezing temperatures in his home months after his gas and electricity supplies were cut off, leaving him with no heating.

“Last Sunday the thermometer was showing 15 degrees below zero, even inside the house,” says Tojiboy-ugli.

He has kept out the worst of the cold by building a miniature stove with bricks and a metal sheet, in which he burns wood from his garden and small pieces of coal. “It doesn’t give out much heat but at least the house is not as cold as outside,” he says.

He has no outstanding gas or electricity bills. He lives alone in his four-room flat near the Uzbekfilm studios in the Chilanzar district of Tashkent. Tojiboy-ugli says that his children left home in August last year ago afraid they would be punished for ‘supporting a trouble-maker’.

Tojiboy-ugli’s gas and electricity supplies were cut off one month later.

“I owed a small amount to the electricity company, around 100,000 sums (then equivalent to US$40.00). I paid it straight away and paid for reconnection, but they still have not restored my gas and electricity supplies,” he says.

The campaigner has written several letters of complaint about this to the prosecutor’s office but nothing has been done to rectify the situation.

On 4th January Tojiboy-ugli took out a lawsuit with the Uchtepe district civil court against the energy company which has left him without heating, but as yet no date has been set for the hearing.

Tojiboy-ugli believes that he is being ‘frozen out’ deliberately because of his human rights activism and is planning to protest on 20th February by staging a picket outside the town hall – a protest he has given advance notice of in writing.

 

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