Lawyer Sergei Mayorov addressed President Mirziyoyev with an open letter, arguing his conclusions about lawlessness in the country with two episodes from his practice.
The lawyer believes that another shameful page of the judicial and law enforcement system was opened in 2021 by the Investigation Department under the Ministry of Internal Affairs with the support of the Prosecutor General’s Office of the Republic of Uzbekistan. In 2021, the employees of the Investigation Department suspended lawyers who provided legal assistance to enterprises belonging to Gofurdzhanovs’ family. Later, the investigators introduced three lawyers, who were suspended from participating in the case, to the criminal group.
The investigators of the Investigation Department completed their attack on the institution of the legal profession using the resources of the Prosecutor General’s Office and the Prosecutor’s Office of Tashkent, having received on June 8, 2022 a court ruling on the arrest of lawyers. According to Mayorov, in this way ‘a new mechanism for neutralizing objectionable lawyers has been created’.
Mayorov has no doubt that the precedent will be replicated by investigators and prosecutors in similar situations.
In the letter, Mayorov also mentions the case of his client, journalist Sergei Yezhkov. The denunciation was written by a former government official. Investigators of the Main Department of Internal Affairs of Tashkent illegally brought a well-known media person to criminal liability for libel.
Earlier, ACCA wrote how Yezhkov had published the article “Diamond boy”, which was a retelling of the publication of another media – Eltuz.com which is blocked in Uzbekistan. Emigrant journalists received evidence of how the head of the Board of Trustees of the Public Fund for the Support and Development of National Mass Media, Komil Allamjonov, facilitated the illegal import of jewelry worth $4.2 million into Uzbekistan.
Eltuz’s original publication contained a transparent allusion to Saida Mirziyoyeva, the deputy head of the Fund and the President’s daughter.
The lawyer is convinced of a gross violation of the Criminal Procedure Code, which consists in initiating the case against Yezhkov. Instead of an inquiry, the investigator mediocrely conducted a biased preliminary investigation, showing professional incompetence or obedience to a decree from above.
The fact that the institution of advocacy in the judicial system of Uzbekistan is actually a sham is once again confirmed by these described cases. The letter notes that ‘prosecutors in court hearings on criminal cases, most often, play the role of extras, since they don’t know the materials of the criminal case and are not focused on the observance of the law’.
“Such functioning of the institution of the bar and the Prosecutor’s Office turns trials into boring performances with a known end,” Mayorov is sure.
In one of the ACCA’s publications about the attacks on the blogger Miraziz Bazarov, the lawyer was also critical of the methods of the secret service. “The State Security Service organized this beating, but they are looking for absolutely the wrong people who actually did it, and of course they are not looking for them,” the lawyer said. “The judge ignored death threats from activist bloggers of a certain ideological orientation.”
