Uzbekistan: Another Journalist Fined for “Defaming the Nation”

Yelena Bondar, one of the few independent journalists operating inside Uzbekistan, is defiant after a Tashkent court ruled earlier this month that she must pay $3,700 in fines for researching the closure of a Russian university campus there.

The court decided that Bondar's research had insulted the nation, as photographer Umida Ahmedova had in 2010 by documenting gender inequality. “Bondar’s defense lawyer says no actual evidence was brought to demonstrate her guilt. Journalists and human rights defenders were not allowed to attend the hearing,” reports the Institute for War and Peace Reporting. From IWPR’s interview with Bondar:

IWPR: This isn’t the first case where lawyers and human rights defenders say charges have not been supported by evidence in court. In March, Viktor Krymzalov was fined for an article he never wrote, while last autumn, Leonid Kudryavtsev, the press officer at the British Embassy, was fined for conducting “illegal training.”

Why is this happening now?

Yelena Bondar: In the cases you’ve cited, trials are not intended to provide fair hearings; they are a pretext for punishing journalists and those who support them. The guilty verdict and the charges are invented.

The authorities are using every means possible to maintain authoritarian rule, so they wage war on dissent and freedom of speech.

IWPR: What measures can journalists who are charged in Uzbekistan take to prove their innocence?

Bondar: At these trials, no one is interested in whether you are innocent. They are trying to use the judiciary, which they control, to punish you. They drag you through the system – police summons, lengthy questioning, statements – and issue a harsh sentence despite there being no proof.

IWPR: So what can local reporters do to fight such deliberately motivated charges?

Bondar: Publicity is the only way. These matters need to be reported in the foreign media, through interviews and the provision of details of the cases. There are no other mechanisms.

Bondar -- who says she will not stop reporting, even though “you can never tell which of your sources the authorities will use against you" -- has been subject to constant harassment since returning home from a journalism training course funded by the OSCE Academy and Deutsche Welle in Bishkek last August.

For an update on how Uzbekistan targets journalists, including a list of the 10 journalists known to be in prison, see this April 4 report by Reporters Without Borders.