Uzbekistan: blogger was sentenced to three years for insulting President
On February 3, the District Court of Khazarasp in Khorezm region sentenced blogger Sobirjon Boboniyazov to three years in prison. He is known in Khorezm region as an active member of the blogging community on the social network. Abdurakhman Tashanov, head of the human rights society “Ezgulik”, reports that the network activist paid for his attacks on President Mirziyoyev.
The investigation was launched in the spring of 2021. On April 21, a forensic linguistic examination showed that the blogger’s posts fall under Article 158 of the Criminal Code (“Assault on the President of the Republic of Uzbekistan”). This article was tightened on March 30 of the same year. So the blogger will serve his term in a colony for corrective labor.
The human rights activist clarifies that “according to the indictment, the blogger committed a crime with aggravating circumstances, that is, repeatedly while intoxicated.”
“The details of the case are unknown, but it’s likely that the investigation was delayed in order to provide a more severe punishment,” the ACCA expert admits.
The trend of pressure and persecution of bloggers is observed almost immediately from the moment when they were announced by Mirziyoyev as the guides of his policy on the way to “New Uzbekistan”. However, the actions of the authorities in their defense are less and less, and there are more and more various attacks.
On February 6, at 17:00, the administrator of TUIT_Online and Talabauz channels, Nodirbek Ashirov, was summoned to the Regional Department of Internal Affairs of Yunusabad and detained for several hours. After midnight, a former student of the Tashkent University of Information Technologies recorded on video an appeal in which he apologized to the leadership of TUIT for excessive criticism and called on young people not to seek to go abroad. At the same time, he named the reason for his stay with law enforcement officers – “he tried to save students from trouble”, and then, for some reason, he warned his subscribers about possible punishment for actions falling under Article 117 of the Criminal Code (“Leaving in danger”). It may well be that, using this article, he was intimidated during interrogations at the Regional Department of Internal Affairs for more than six hours.
A well-known Uzbek blogger Umid Gafurov responded to his detention with an unexpected post. He recalled how in 2018 Nodirbek became one of the initiators of the slanderous campaign against him. Earlier, ACCA published a material about harassment: TUIT students and part-time activists of the Youth Union spread all sorts of insinuations about Umid. The reason for trolling was the posts of the blogger about the problematic system of higher education.
