Uzbek Rights Activist Gets One Year Off Sentence

An appeal court in Uzbekistan has knocked one year off the prison term handed down to human rights activist Farhodkhon Mukhtarov, but colleagues say the sentence remains fundamentally unjust.

The Tashkent city court reduced Mukhtarov’s sentence from five to four years at an appeal hearing on December 3.

Two months earlier, the Yunusabad district court had convicted the 41-year-old activist, a member of the Human Rights Alliance of Uzbekistan, of fraud and bribery.

Arrested in July, he was accused of taking 4,000 US dollars from a defendant in a court case, with the intention of passing it to the judge. Mukhtarov denied the allegation.
(See Jail for Another Uzbek Rights Activist for more on the case.)

He had been involved in helping defendants in many court cases, and had also spoken out against the use of torture in detention and against forced child labour in cotton farming.

Ahead of the appeal hearing, the New York-based rights group Human Rights Watch had called for judges to review the case in a “fair and independent” manner.

During the appeal hearing, a witness for the defence, Rano Azimova, alleged that a key document used in evidence had a forged signature, but that the lower court had ignored this.

Human Rights Alliance member Oleg Sarapulov says the prosecution witness Sadykbekova has acknowledged that she did not give money to the defendant to use as a bribe, so this charge has not been proved.

(NBCA is an IWPR-funded project to create a multilingual news analysis and comment service for Central Asia, drawing on the expertise of a broad range of political observers across the region. The project ran from August 2006 to September 2007, covering all five regional states. With new funding, the service has resumed, covering Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan.)