Azerbaijan, Baku, October 28 /Trend News, V.Zhavoronkova /

By dropping sanctions with regards to Uzbekistan at this stage, the European Union (EU) failed to stay true to its principles, said Veronika Szente Goldston, Advocacy Director for Europe and Central Asia at Human Rights Watch.

"By dropping the sanctions under these circumstances, the EU has failed to stay true to its own reform demands, leaving in the lurch the more than dozen human rights activists whom the Uzbek government continues to imprison on politically motivated grounds, and severely undermining its own credibility as a principled promoter of human rights," Goldston wrote in an e-mail to Trend News.

The foreign ministers of 27 EU countries have decided to lift the embargo on arms supplies to Uzbekistan.

They made such a decision at a meeting on Tuesday in Luxembourg. Earlier, this step was approved by the ambassadors of the EU member states, and therefore, the ministers made the decision without discussion.

Sanctions with regards to Uzbekistan were introduced by the EU in May 2005 after riots in Andijan, where about 200 people were killed. Then the EU demanded an international investigation. However, the Uzbek government refused to take this step, in response to which sanctions were imposed in the form of visa restrictions and embargo on arms supply.

Goldston said that those opposed to the sanctions always argued that they were not effective, that they only served to alienate Tashkent and stood in the way for a more constructive relationship.

But the fact is that the EU never mustered enough political will to actually use the sanctions as policy tools for positive change, she said.

"Germany in particular began undermining them from the very moment they were imposed, inviting then-interior minister of Uzbekistan Zakirdzhon Almatov to Germany for medical treatment despite the fact that he was on the top of the visa ban the EU had just introduced," said Goldston. 

According to her, key European leaders failed to give the sanctions the political backing necessary to allow them to be effective, and then used as their chief argument the sanctions' lack of effectiveness for why they should be dropped.

"The main question that these EU leaders should be asked is what the EU has achieved by effectively dropping the sanctions 12 months ago?, said Goldston. Since that time, the Uzbek government's human rights record has only further deteriorated.