On November 11, the Mirabad District Criminal Court of Tashkent sentenced Sevinch Sadullayeva to five days of arrest. For four days, the press service of the courts of the capital didn’t report this and only after posts on social networks decided to publish it.
The press release mentions the initials of the petitioner – N.U., who wrote the petition concerning an Instagram blogger to the Department for coordinating the activities of the Internal Affairs Department of Mirabad district of Tashkent.
Further, from the publication of the online media Xabar.uz, it became clear who the author of the actual denunciation was. The signatory was the deputy hokim of Tashkent, head of the family and women department Nodira Umarova.
The official described a whole operation to identify, together with law enforcement officers, the malicious activities of a network self-promoter, from which she was recognized by the court as the injured party. On the basis of the court verdict, 20-year-old Sevinch ‘deliberately ignored the rules of behavior in society and violated public order, which caused reasonable claims from citizens’.
The head of the city administration ‘has established that after punishment in the form of imprisonment, citizen S.S. will be taken under full control, trained in some profession and sent to a permanent job’. In a comment to the media, Nodira Umarova hinted at the abnormality of the blogger and promised that ‘regular work would be carried out with the citizen including some correctional work with the help of psychologists’.
During two years since the creation of the blog on Instagram, 310 thousand users have subscribed to Sevinch Sadullayeva.
The anger of the official was caused by photos and videos of two young people posted online. Judge Surayokhon Khozhamkulova assessed the severity of the crime under Article 183 of the Code of Administrative Liability “Petty hooliganism” (petty hooliganism, that is, deliberate disregard for the rules of behavior in society, expressed in obscene language in public places, insulting harassment of citizens and other similar actions, violating public order and tranquility of citizens).
“Administrative arrest cannot be applied to women with children under the age of three. This is stated in Article 29 of the Code,” the ACCA expert notes. “Sevinch has a one-and-a-half-year-old daughter, but the court ignored this circumstance, because there was such a great desire, albeit illegally, to punish the girl with detention, and not with a fine. For some reason, the filming partner wasn’t considered guilty for violating the rules of etiquette and behavior in society.
After a reaction in the lobby of the authorities and an appeal filed on November 16, the Criminal Court of Tashkent city commuted the sentence to four days of arrest. Sevinch has already been released. Online users called this decision hypocritical. This time the court took into account age, gender, the presence of a minor child and the blogger’s regret about what she had done.
The gender bias of the Uzbek Themis also manifested itself in the investigation of the brutal beating of a woman in front of her child. In Denau district of Surkhandarya region, the torturer escaped with only a fine, despite the fact that he was charged under the articles of the Administrative Code on slander, insult, intentional infliction of bodily injury, intentional damage to property and arbitrariness.
Even more surprising was the case of inducing group sex of a 14-year-old girl. One year ago, on November 11, 2021, the court sentenced three men to various terms of imprisonment. But already in May of this year, they were released. The unserved term of imprisonment was replaced by corrective labor.
The girl’s mother lost the appeal, after which she filed a cassation appeal with the Supreme Court of Uzbekistan. “Three convicts no longer come to the second meeting of the highest judicial institution of the state, which, in fact, treats rapists condescendingly, but harshly towards the producers of glamorous content, considering them a serious threat to freely interpreted national values and spirituality,” the ACCA expert comments. “This year, on September 25, another underage girl was raped in Baysun district of the same Surkhandarya region. The investigator found no signs of a crime and tried to close the case.”
