Rough justice in Uzbekistan

Oleg Kuznetsov, a 72-year-old pensioner in Uzbekistan, is a criminal according to the country's courts, although his crime took place while he was out of the country and involved the theft of his own property.
The misdemeanour? Stealing some rusty old metal piping used as an arbour for a grapevine outside his apartment block. The punishment? A fine he cannot afford to pay. In fact, Kuznetsov says, he is the victim of "telephone justice" - a Soviet-era expression for corrupt judicial decisions - because he pushed a drunk out of the communal staircase of his block, and the drunk turned out to be a judge.
The pensioner has a pile of documents detailing his legal battles and believes his case is an example of wider injustices.
For Kuznetsov, the consequences could mean he has to sell his home.
But for 15 men on trial for terrorism in the Supreme Court, and dozens more awaiting trial, the stakes are much higher.
The men are accused of plotting a rebellion in the town of Andizhan in May. All of them pleaded guilty and face long jail terms in a verdict due next week.
Human rights groups have denounced the judicial process as a show trial in which the defendants were coerced into making bogus confessions. They say the government is covering up the massacre of hundreds of men, women and children by Uzbek troops.
All of which is far removed from Kuznetsov and the stolen pipes - but he says his case shows why courts in the authoritarian ex-Soviet state are fundamentally flawed.
Kuznetsov's story has many twists and turns: a former architect, he bought some metal piping in the 1970s to build a playground in the yard outside his apartment for his children. But a neighbour complained that would encourage noise and the pipes were set in concrete to be used for an arbour.
Years later, in December 2002, he argued with the drunk man.
The following month he was summoned to the police station. A neighbour had written a statement denouncing him for stealing some of the pipes that formed the arbour. He denied taking them, and also sought to prove that, in any case, he was the owner.
During one of the first court hearings, Kuznetsov said he recognised the judge as the drunk man with whom he had argued. Since then he has been in and out of court, has written appeals to President Islam Karimov, prosecutors and the Supreme Court.
All to no avail. Earlier this year a court ordered him to pay 915,000 soms ($800) - a huge sum in the Central Asian country, where a state pension is around $20 a month - to the neighbour who lodged the complaint.
Although sprightly for his age, many observers would find it hard to believe Kuznetsov could have used a welding tool to dismantle some of the pipes.
He appears to have no motive for the crime. He says alibis showing that he was in Kazakhstan when the alleged crime took place were not accepted by the court, and key hearings took place when he was ill and could not attend the court sessions.
"Early on, one of the police investigators told me he could make the charges go away for $500," said Kuznetsov, an ethnic Russian who has spent most of his life in Uzbekistan.
While it is not possible to verify the details of Kuznetsov's legal battle, and even he cannot explain why the full force of the legal system appeared to be stacked against him, his case finds echoes in more serious trials. "If the terrorists are criminals in the same way that I am a criminal, then what kind of terrorists are they exactly?" Kuznetsov said. "I have doubts: how do we know the men in the dock are not just some ordinary tramps instead of terrorists?"
The United Nations' special rapporteur on the independence of judges and lawyers, Leandro Despouy, shares those doubts.
He said last month he was "sceptical" about the trial and was worried that the defendants could have been tortured. Uzbek officials have said the Andizhan trial is transparent and say its critics play into the hands of the "terrorists".
"An element of the general strategy employed by the organisers of the terrorist acts was to unleash a wide information and propaganda attack against Uzbekistan involving international human rights organisations," the Foreign Ministry said in a statement last month.
All 15 of the accused read out long confessions that follow the official line on what happened: foreign-financed Islamist "terrorists", helped by foreign journalists, were seeking to stage a coup.
But independent witnesses in Andizhan on May 13, including a Reuters reporter, said they saw troops open fire on an unarmed crowd of protesters, including women and children. Other witnesses estimate that the death toll ran into the hundreds.