Has a new mem­ber, Alisher Sai­pov. Sai­pov was shot dead out­side his office. Of course, there is no evid­ence con­nect­ing the murder of this critic of the Uzbek régime and afore­said repress­ive régime.

Why only the other week, the European Union was offer­ing Uzbek­istan a little car­rot, to encour­age it to repress a little more lightly [my ital­ics below]:

With a view to encour­aging the Uzbek author­it­ies to take pos­it­ive steps to improve the human rights situ­ation and tak­ing into account their com­mit­ments, the Coun­cil decided that the visa restric­tions would not apply for a period of six months, at which point the Coun­cil will review if the Uzbek author­it­ies have made pro­gress towards meet­ing the con­di­tions men­tioned in para­graph 4 of these Con­clu­sions. The Coun­cil may decide to apply the visa restric­tions earlier if neces­sary, in light of the actions of the Uzbek author­it­ies in the area of human rights.

We wouldn’t want to reim­pose sanc­tions because some guy with a three month old daugh­ter couldn’t keep his mouth shut — now would we?

And we don’t want to annoy our Ger­man friends who can see a side to the Uzbek régime that cyn­ical types like Craig Mur­ray seem quite unable to.

And just who would we like to see shot dead next, to keep the house warm and the heat­ing bills down this winter?