Supreme Court acquits three bloggers who were fined 13.5 million soums each in Samarkand 

As it turned out, blogger Jamshid Ismatov from Samarkand posted a video on the social network depicting Navbakhor Ulugmurodova, a woman from Past Dargom, living in a barn. Later, two other bloggers were also involved in the filming process.

In the video material, it is told that the woman’s husband died, and as she does not have a place to live, she is currently living in a barn belonging to her brother.

However, the Past Dargom district administration denied the allegations in the video and accused the bloggers, who studied the problem of the applicant woman, of preparing a play. The regional DIA launched a pre-investigations check against them.

According to the decision of the Past Dargom district court on criminal cases (judge: A. Khaydarov), bloggers – Nasim Kholov, born in 1987 in Boysun district of Surkhandarya region, Jamshid Ismatov, born in 1985 in Past Dargom district, Sirojiddin Odilov, born in 1980 in Tashkent city – were found guilty of committing a crime under Article 40 (Defamation), Article 45 (Violation of privacy of citizens’ residence), Part 1 of Article 202-2 (Illegal seizure of a land plot) of the Administrative Responsibility Code. In accordance with Article 34 of this Code, each of them was imposed a fine of 50 BCAs, that is, 13 million 500 thousand soums.

The judgment of the first instance court was left unchanged by the decision of the appellate instance of the criminal trial panel of the Samarkand regional court on August 30, 2022.

Based on the complaint of the bloggers, the Supreme Court considered the case in the cassation procedure. It was found that the cassation instance did not receive an explanation from the main witness of the case, Navbahor Ulugmurodova, a number of shortcomings were made by the preliminary investigation body, the court of first instance did not pay attention to these errors, the appellate court in the case did not sufficiently follow the explanations of the above law and the decision of the Supreme Court plenum, the decision of the first instance court was left unchanged, and the arguments presented by the bloggers questioned at the appellate court were not justified.

In addition, the Court of Cassation found that the evidence based on which J. Ismatov, N. Kholov and S. Odilov were found guilty of defamation offenses examined in the courts of first instance and appeal was not sufficient to convict them of these offenses and the bloggers had not been proven to have committed these offenses.

Accordingly, the decision of the Past Dargom district court on July 1, 2022 regarding the criminal cases against Jamshid Ismatov, Nasim Kholov, and Sirojiddin Odilov and the decision of the appellate instance of the criminal trial panel of the Samarkand regional court against them were canceled. The administrative offense case opened against the bloggers was terminated based on Paragraph 1, Article 271 of the Administrative Responsibility Code.