Uzbekistan: Journalist has asserted her rights in the Supreme Court
A positive decision on the cassation appeal of Anastasia Pavlenko was made by the Judicial Collegium of the Supreme Court. The deputy chief editor of the regional newspapers “Zarafshon” – “Bulletin of Samarkand” considered the decisions of the courts of Samarkand adopted in early 2022 to be unfair.
As ACCA wrote earlier, on February 16, the Regional Court of Samarkand for Criminal Cases confirmed the legality of the punishment of Anastasia Pavlenko. On January 18, the City Court recognized her as a slanderer and fined her $530.
The journalist suffered for her sincere desire to save the house of Pavel Benkov, the founder of easel painting in Uzbekistan, from demolition. The plaintiff and the owner of the house tried to actually erase the house from the list of cultural heritage for the sake of large-scale construction, but this was prevented by the publications of the journalist and the administrator of the initiative group “Let’s save Samarkand” on the social network. So, new construction has been suspended.
As Anastasia herself wrote on the social network, “The judge didn’t manage to consider carefully the essence of my actions; there was a complete disregard for my professional activities and the fulfillment of civic duty, ignorance of the country’s legislation.” The post on Facebook and the article in newspaper, that caused the lawsuit, can still be read, but the judge didn’t even demand to remove them, which only confirms the ordered nature of the case.
If the situation for Anastasia was resolved successfully, then the attack of ill-wishers on the editor of the online media Rost24.uz was successful. This was published by Gazeta.uz. Anora Sadikova announced the removal from her website of material about Jakhongir Usmanov, the son of the late senator, former deputy prime minister who oversaw trade, head of the Football Federation and the National Olympic Committee Mirabror Usmanov. The journalist posted the deleted video on her Facebook page.
The material deals with the activities of the entrepreneur, CEO and founder of Ardus company and the head of Ezgu maksad [Good purpose] charitable foundation. The name of Jakhongir Usmanov appears in the Pandora Archive, which is called one of the largest leaks of financial documents.
After the publication of the article and video, Anora Sadikova announced threats and pressure.
“For a month, we conducted an investigation based on the facts and published material. However, they called my colleague and said that if we want a quiet life, we should remove the material. After that, we had to remove the article from the site and the video from YouTube,” she said in an interview with Human.uz.
