According to information provided to IPI, Hurriyat weekly journalist Sobirdjon Yakubov was detained on suspicion of religious extremism on 11 April in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. Three days later, Yakubov was charged under Article 159 of the Criminal Code and accused of anti-constitutional activity, which carries a sentence of up to 20 years in prison. The arrest was later confirmed by the Deputy Interior Minister, Alisher Sharafutdinov.
Yakubov is currently being held in an interior ministry detention center and should be transferred to Tashkent prison on 21 April.
While the official charge is based on the journalist’s alleged religious activities, Yakubov’s colleagues at Hurriyat have suggested that the real reason for his arrest is his work as a journalist. In a 16 March article about the Ukrainian journalist Georgiy Gongadze, who was murdered in 2000, Yakubov wrote that Gongadze’s death was an important factor in the so called “Orange Revolution” in the country because it “became a driving force to realise the necessity of democratic reforms and freedom.” He also suggested that former government officials may have been implicated in the crime.
According to local reports, Yakubov is a practicing Muslim who has written about his hajj pilgrimage to Mecca in an article titled, “A journey to the dreamland”. It has been reported elsewhere that Yakubov’s article also accused the United States of diluting its human rights monitoring in Uzbekistan after President Islam Karimov allowed the country to install an air base in the south of Uzbekistan.
Yakubov is the second journalist working for Hurriyat to be arrested on charges of “anti-constitutional activity” in the past two years. On 18 February 2003, an Uzbek court sentenced freelance journalist Ghairat Mekhliboev to seven years in prison after convicting him of being a member of Hizb ut-Tahrir, a proscribed Islamic organisation. The verdict focused on Mekhliboev’s work as a journalist, including an article published in Hurriyat in 2001 that allegedly contained the ideas of Hizb ut-Tahrir.
Speaking about the situation, IPI Director Johann Fritz said that he was deeply concerned for Yakubov and other journalists in the country. “The ambiguity of the charge will enable the authorities to arrest other journalists in the same manner, thus suppressing the independent and critical media.”
“IPI believes that everyone has the right ‘to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers,’ in accordance with Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and I am worried that the Uzbek government will use its fight against terrorism as an excuse to silence the critical voices who need to be heard in Uzbekistan,” Fritz said.
