Jailed For Insulting The Uzbek President 

ALMATY -- Earlier this year, Sitora Bozorova, a 24-year-old woman, was sentenced to five years in prison over social media posts that called for the "dynasty" of President Shavkat Mirziyoev to "burn."

Bozorova, who was also accused of making a highly unflattering remark about Mirziyoev's daughter and top aide Saida Mirziyoeva, is now among a growing number of citizens who are being jailed for insulting the head of state -- a crime introduced into the legal code in 2021.

Since becoming president in 2016, Mirziyoev has positioned himself as a champion of freer speech, a shift away from the heavy authoritarianism of his predecessor, Islam Karimov, and one that was greeted enthusiastically at home and abroad. That now looks like a bygone era, and the protections afforded to Mirziyoev are only helping to widen and deepen the crackdown.

Straight To Jail

The legal tweak -- Article 158, Part 3 -- is part of a growing arsenal available to the Uzbek authorities, who are eager to stifle the kind of everyday dissent that became more common after the tentative opening up.

It is a legal weapon very much in vogue.

Citing data from the Supreme Court, UzNews, a privately owned media outlet, reported this month that at least 10 people have been sentenced to jail over insults to the president in the last 12 months.

The cases detailed by the news agency covered citizens between 25 and 60 years old, who received sentences ranging from correctional labor to the maximum sentence for the crime -- five years -- and even beyond in instances where defendants were being sentenced for other crimes as well.

Overwhelmingly, the basis for the convictions were posts or online comments, with none of the offenders scattered across different regions of Uzbekistan enjoying large online followings.

This type of targeting is now par for the course, said Nadezhda Ataeva, chairwoman of the Paris-based Association for Human Rights in Central Asia (AHRCA), which is set to soon publish a report on the state of freedom of speech in Uzbekistan in cooperation with the Brussels-based International Partnership for Human Rights (IPHR).

Ataeva told RFE/RL that Uzbekistan’s law books now contain around 30 articles in some way or another connected to speech. In the vast majority of jailings under Article 158, Part 3, the citizens being incarcerated have no prior convictions, she said.

“In many other countries, when it comes to offenses relating to speech, the first response from law enforcement is a caution," Ataeva said. "In Uzbekistan, there is no warning, just a prison sentence straight away.”

And, so far, pleas for leniency have fallen on deaf ears.

“I can’t imagine that my daughter would insult the president,” Bozorova’s mother, Saodat Kurbanova, told RFE/RL's Uzbek Service, before launching an impassioned appeal to the president.

“President, please, my daughter has to get married," she said. "I don’t want her to spend her life in prison like some hooligan. She had so many hopes and dreams. I ask you to take account of my appeals and assist us so that my daughter is vindicated and so that she might return home to us.”

The youngest citizen known to have been jailed for presidential insults was a 19-year-old from Samarkand, who was sentenced to 2 1/2 years imprisonment in October 2023.

A copy of a court judgment seen by RFE/RL’s Uzbek Service states that Dilshod Iskandarov left a comment cursing current and future generations of Mirziyoevs under a video about the president’s family on Instagram.

Iskandarov, who was in Russia at the time, deleted the comment on the advice of his friends and repented in court, but his plea of immaturity did not spare him prison time.

Stalled Progress

In 2019, some three years after the death of longtime Uzbek leader Islam Karimov, the Paris-based press freedom watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF) changed its description of Uzbekistan's press freedom environment from "very serious" to merely "difficult."

For the first time, in RSF's annual World Press Freedom Index, Uzbekistan was no longer one of those brick red countries like China, Iran, and Saudi Arabia highlighted for being the planet’s top-level offenders of the free press.

Instead, it was part of the peachy-colored band that included Colombia, Morocco, Indonesia, and Uzbekistan's Central Asian neighbor Kazakhstan.

Five years on from that achievement, Uzbekistan is back in the brick red again, placing 148th out of 180 countries, 11 places below last year's ranking.

“There is a great pressure on websites and bloggers. Materials are regularly deleted. Censorship, self-censorship. Colleagues are either leaving journalism or thinking about leaving,” journalist Shukhrat Latipov wrote on his Telegram channel in response to Uzbekistan’s plunge in the index, which RSF releases annually on May 3, World Press Freedom Day.

The recent cases of people receiving jail time for insulting the president appear to mark an intensification of the more general crackdown that began toward the end of Mirziyoev's first term in office and appeared to target the new generation of citizen journalists who have emerged in recent years.

One of the first Uzbeks to wind up behind bars in this respect was Otabek Sattoriy, a video blogger from the southern city of Termez, who relentlessly criticized local officials for corruption and mismanagement.

Far from insulting Mirziyoev, he cited the president as an inspiration. Earlier in his reign, the Uzbek president called on bloggers to “expose shortcomings” among officials, while promising that he “stands behind” journalists.

But Sattoriy was sentenced to 6 1/2 years in prison in May 2021 on charges of extortion and slander, gaining early release from jail in February of this year. Although free from jail, Sattoriy must pay 20 percent of any wages that he earns to the state for the remainder of his sentence.

Since Sattoriy’s sentencing, extortion has become a common crime for bloggers to be convicted of in Uzbekistan.

In an interview with RFE/RL last year, Umida Niyazova, director of the Berlin-based Uzbek Forum for Human Rights, suggested that this was part of a deliberate tactic to make cases against bloggers look like disputes between private citizens.

"Secondly, practice shows that extortion charges are easy to fabricate. It is not necessary to present material evidence. It is enough for someone to write a statement to police that some blogger extorted money," Niyazova said at the time.

Another charge levied against bloggers is threatening public security and the “constitutional order” -- a vague charge beloved by prosecutors and courts during the Karimov era as well.

Fozilxoja Orifxojaev, a blogger sentenced to 7 1/2 years in prison on those charges at the beginning of 2022, was released from prison in December of last year after having his sentence commuted to a parole-like punishment.

But heading in the other direction that same month was Olimjon Khaidarov, a popular blogger from the Ferghana Valley city of Qoqand, who was handed eight years in jail for extortion and defamation.

These heavy sentences are having their desired effect: muffling critical voices.

Like their colleagues in Uzbekistan's print and broadcast media, bloggers are either toning down or giving up, often with explicit encouragement from the authorities.

Last year, RSF raised the alarm after pressure from the authorities meant that six Telegram channels in a single region of southern Uzbekistan were shut down, depriving tens of thousands of readers of news.

At the same time, pro-government bloggers are expanding their hold over the information space, building up massive followings with what rights activist Ataeva describes as “portrayals of a glamorous lifestyle.”

This all means that Mirziyoev’s regime is losing a valuable feedback mechanism, Ataeva argued.

“Uzbekistan is once again becoming like an aquarium where the water is turning foul, but citizens aren’t allowed to say anything. They are just fish that have to shut up and swim,” Ataeva said.