WARSAW/ALMATY: The Central Asian republic of Uzbekistan is routinely torturing imprisoned journalists and rights activists, a global rights watchdog alleged Friday, urging Western sanctions on Tashkent and launching a Twitter campaign to highlight the issue.

Torture of political prisoners is also widespread in the Central Asian country courted by the West as a transit point for forces fighting in Afghanistan, the US campaign group Human Rights Watch said in a report.

Some 34 such prisoners locked up “on politically motivated charges suffer torture and abysmal prison conditions,” Human Rights Watch said in a new 121-page report.

The group’s researcher on Central Asia, Steve Swerdlow, told AFP on the margins of an annual international rights conference in Warsaw that the US and Europe should flex their sanctions muscle to curb the problem.

“They can very quickly develop some targeted measures against Uzbek officials,” he said.

“The UN with its Human Rights Council also has a lot of tools at its disposal,” Swerdlow said, urging it to set up a special monitoring body for the country of 30 million.

President Islam Karimov, 76, tolerates no dissent in the ex-Soviet state of 30 million people, which he has ruled since 1989.