Social media users posted photos of the demolished house of civil activist Amriddin Alovatshoev, who was convicted last week.
An unfinished house in the administrative center of Roshtkal district of the Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Oblast (GBAO) was demolished in late March while Alovatshoev was under arrest. Authorities said the house was built illegally on land owned by a local school. “The land for the construction of the house was allocated illegally, for which the former head of the Regional Land Committee, Osmon Alidodov, has already been sentenced to 8 years in prison,” the authorities of Roshtkal district say.
However, Alovatshoev’s relatives claim that Amriddin received all the necessary permits for the construction of the house in 2013. “For a year he collected the documents. By the way, the certificate confirming Alovatshoev’s right to own a land plot and build a house is also available,” they say.
According to them, for another 7 years Amriddin was building his house. Since he didn’t have the necessary amount of money for these purposes, he managed to complete only the first floor of the building. “During this time, no one has made claims about the illegality of construction,” the relatives complain, noting that the demolition equipment was sent from Khorog.
It’s worth noting that the first and only court session in the case of the leader of Badakhshan’s youth in Moscow (forcibly returned from Russia), Amriddin Alovatshoev, began in the afternoon of April 29 in Dushanbe. By the evening, the sentence was passed – 18 years in prison in a high-security colony.
Alovatshoev was found guilty under five articles of the Criminal Code of the Republic of Tajikistan: Article 181 part 2 paragraph “a” (“Taking hostages”), Article 182 part 3 paragraph “a” (“Seizure of buildings, structures, means of communications”), Article 187 part 1 (“Organization of a criminal community”), Article 189 part 3 (“Inciting national, racial, local or religious hatred”), Article 307 note 2 (“Organization of an extremist community”).
The trial was held in an “open-closed mode” in the pre-trial detention center (the court was declared open, but it was held in the building of the pre-trial detention center, which is considered a closed facility. So, a special permission from the court and the penitentiary institution is required to participate in the trial).
According to the relatives of the defendant, even they weren’t allowed to the trial, not to mention journalists and representatives of civil society. “They didn’t let the lawyers in either. They were informed late about the beginning of the process. When they came to the pre-trial detention center building, they were told that the process was already underway and they weren’t allowed in. We think it was done intentionally,” said one of Alovatshoev’s relatives.
“The petitions of the lawyers to call the main and additional witnesses and challenge the judge were rejected. Alovatshoev and his lawyers don’t agree with the court verdict and are planning to file a cassation appeal,” the Coalition against Torture in Tajikistan, which provided Alovatshoev with the services of the lawyer, said.
Amriddin Alovatshoev was detained on the territory of the Russian Federation and forcibly returned to Tajikistan, presumably on January 12, 2022. Only on February 2, the country’s authorities officially announced the extradition of the activist. At the press conference that day, the Prosecutor General of Tajikistan Yusuf Rahmon confirmed that Alovatshoev had been extradited from Russia at the request of the authorities of Tajikistan in connection with a criminal case against him. However, no additional information was provided. On the same day, during a press conference, Shodi Hafizzoda, head of the Department for Combating Organized Crime under the Ministry of Internal Affairs, said that a criminal case had been opened against Alovatshoev for taking a hostage and some other crimes. The head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs Ramazon Rakhimzoda, answering a question about the fate of Alovatshoev, noted that ‘he voluntarily returned to his homeland’ and he was immediately detained at the airport on charges of organizing protests in Khorog in 2018.
According to Alovatshoev’s relatives, unidentified people pursued Amriddin after he actively participated in a protest action by people from Gorno-Badakhshan in November 2021 near the Embassy of Tajikistan in Moscow, demanding that those responsible for the murder of their countryman Gulbiddin Ziyobekov in GBAO be held accountable. His relatives say that Amriddin has ended up in this situation precisely because of his active civic position.
