Uzbeks voted for parliament on Sunday in a poll that drew sharp criticism from Europe's top election watchdog after opposition groups were barred from participating.
Responding to the criticism from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), President Islam Karimov said: "The OSCE cannot have the exclusive right to assess elections."
The OSCE, which sent 21 observers, has said Uzbekistan provided insufficient conditions for a democratic vote.
The OSCE said its presence should not be construed as a sign that the vote was legitimate.
After casting his ballot on Sunday at a polling station in the capital, Tashkent, Karimov said the OSCE, of which Uzbekistan is a member, "represents Europe while we're in Central Asia."
Uzbekistan has hosted US troops near its border with Afghanistan since 2001. But Washington has cut aid to the country, citing its lack of progress on democratic reforms.
"OSCE observers don't like the calm situation in which the elections are held and they are surprised why there's no fierce competition," Karimov said, defending the inactive campaigns of the candidates, all of whom represent the five parties loyal to Karimov.
None of Uzbekistan's four small opposition groups are formally recognized. They said authorities rejected their registration requests.
Some opposition parties urged voters to boycott the elections.
After polls closed at 8pm, election officials said turnout had been 85.1 percent, far more than the 33 percent minimum required to make the poll valid. The Central Election Commission said no irregularities were reported.
Karimov said on Sunday that the country had no "real" opposition and that the existing opposition groups had no popular support.
Leader of the opposition Erk Party, Atonazar Arifov, said Sunday's poll showed that "the government doesn't want either democratic rule or free elections with real competition."
The vote caps a year of growing public discontent over the lack of freedoms in this former Soviet republic and a series of deadly attacks blamed on radical Islamic groups.
The few voters who trickled into polling stations in Tashkent expressed cynicism, and many appeared to have ignored the vote altogether.
‘CHILD PORNOGRAPHY’: The doll on Shein’s Web site measure about 80cm in height, and it was holding a teddy bear in a photo published by a daily newspaper France’s anti-fraud unit on Saturday said it had reported Asian e-commerce giant Shein (希音) for selling what it described as “sex dolls with a childlike appearance.” The French Directorate General for Competition, Consumer Affairs and Fraud Control (DGCCRF) said in a statement that the “description and categorization” of the items on Shein’s Web site “make it difficult to doubt the child pornography nature of the content.” Shortly after the statement, Shein announced that the dolls in question had been withdrawn from its platform and that it had launched an internal inquiry. On its Web site, Le Parisien daily published a
China’s Shenzhou-20 crewed spacecraft has delayed its return mission to Earth after the vessel was possibly hit by tiny bits of space debris, the country’s human spaceflight agency said yesterday, an unusual situation that could disrupt the operation of the country’s space station Tiangong. An impact analysis and risk assessment are underway, the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) said in a statement, without providing a new schedule for the return mission, which was originally set to land in northern China yesterday. The delay highlights the danger to space travel posed by increasing amounts of debris, such as discarded launch vehicles or vessel
RUBBER STAMP? The latest legislative session was the most productive in the number of bills passed, but critics attributed it to a lack of dissenting voices On their last day at work, Hong Kong’s lawmakers — the first batch chosen under Beijing’s mantra of “patriots administering Hong Kong” — posed for group pictures, celebrating a job well done after four years of opposition-free politics. However, despite their smiles, about one-third of the Legislative Council will not seek another term in next month’s election, with the self-described non-establishment figure Tik Chi-yuen (狄志遠) being among those bowing out. “It used to be that [the legislature] had the benefit of free expression... Now it is more uniform. There are multiple voices, but they are not diverse enough,” Tik said, comparing it
Prime ministers, presidents and royalty on Saturday descended on Cairo to attend the spectacle-laden inauguration of a sprawling new museum built near the pyramids to house one of the world’s richest collections of antiquities. The inauguration of the Grand Egyptian Museum, or GEM, marks the end of a two-decade construction effort hampered by the Arab Spring uprisings, the COVID-19 pandemic and wars in neighboring countries. “We’ve all dreamed of this project and whether it would really come true,” Egyptian Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly told a news conference, calling the museum a “gift from Egypt to the whole world from a
RSS