* Rights group leaves Uzbekistan after 15-year presence
* Says Uzbekistan among most repressive regimes
* Warns the West against complacency in ties with Tashkent
* Torture "widespread and systematic" in Uzbek jails - HRW
(Adds quotes, details, background)
By Dmitry Solovyov
ALMATY, March 15 (Reuters) - Uzbekistan has forced Human Rights Watch to shut down its local office, the group said on Tuesday, calling for tougher U.S. and European Union policies towards the authoritarian Central Asian state.
"Human Rights Watch's expulsion comes during a deepening human rights crisis in Uzbekistan," New York-based HRW said.
"Well over a dozen human rights and political activists and independent journalists are in prison; torture and ill-treatment in the criminal justice system are systematic, and serious violations go unpunished," it said in a statement.
President Islam Karimov, 73, has run Uzbekistan for two decades, brooking no dissent to his rule. The country of 28 million is a major cotton and gold producer and is estimated to hold ample gas reserves.
HRW, whose researchers had been working in the country for 15 years, said the Uzbek authorities had obstructed its work by denying visas and work accreditations to its staff, before finally moving to withdraw its office registration this month.
Uzbek Foreign Ministry officials were not immediately available for comment.
Karimov has defended his unflinching rule by saying he wants to prevent the advent of militant Islam in his majority Muslim nation.
He has provided a vital transit route through Uzbekistan for cargo supplies for a U.S.-led war in next-door Afghanistan.
COURTING WEST, TRAMPLING NGOs
Karimov, who enjoys vast powers, has sought to thaw icy ties with the West after his troops toughly suppressed an uprising in the eastern city of Andizhan in 2005. He has blamed the uprising on Islamic radicals "seeking to rock stability".
"Uzbekistan has now unambiguously joined a shortlist of repressive governments that prevent Human Rights Watch from carrying out our work on the ground," HRW executive director Kenneth Roth said in the statement.
HRW said that over the last seven years Uzbekistan had expelled nearly every international non-governmental organisation (NGO) and consistently denied access to human rights monitors, including special United Nations rapporteurs.
"Tashkent has apparently calculated that brutalising the population and stonewalling international reporting are cost-free," Roth said.
"The EU and the U.S. need to prove this cynical calculus wrong and make sure human rights abuses will be noticed and carry clear consequences."
Giving detailed descriptions of several cases of torture in Uzbek jails, including examples of several pious Muslim believers, HRW said that "confessions obtained under torture are often the sole basis for convictions".
"Methods commonly used include beatings with truncheons, electric shock, hanging by wrists and ankles, rape and sexual humiliation, asphyxiation with plastic bags and gas masks, and threats of physical harm to relatives," it said.
A mother of a teenage boy, quoted under an assumed name, told HRW that her son had been tortured in a pre-trial detention centre last November.
"He told me that several officers had forced him to confess to having committed theft," the mother said. "They put cellophane sheet over his head and then put a gas mask on him. He couldn't breathe and eventually signed the confession."
(Editing by Michael Roddy)
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