Five Baptist men sentenced to ten days' imprisonment on 16
August for attending a service in a private home have been ordered to pay for
their own detention. The five – E. Kim, S. Stanislavsky, A. Tyan, N.
Zuldikarov, and O. Solijonov – were sentenced under Article 240 of the Criminal
Code, which punishes "breaking the law on religious organisations",
according to a 17 August report from local Baptists reaching Forum 18 News
Service. The judge strongly defended his decision to imprison the five, telling
Forum 18 he had to make an example of the Baptists as "illegal"
religious activity in the district was rising.
The five men, together with three Baptist women, were arrested on 15 August
during a service in a home in the village of Khalkabad in the Pap district of
Namangan region, in Uzbekistan's section of the Fergana valley. The 16 August
hearing, chaired by the head of the Pap district criminal court Bahtierjon
Batyrov, was held in Uzbek, even though of those accused only Solijonov
understands the language. All five men were sentenced to 10 days' imprisonment,
with each being ordered to pay 816 sums for each day of detention in temporary
cells in Namangan (63 Norwegian kroner, 8 Euros or 8 US dollars for 10 days).
The women Baptists, I. Boiko, N. Stanislavskaya and the owner of the apartment
A. Osnovina, were each handed down a fine under Article 240 of 6,440 sums (51
Norwegian kroner, 6 Euros or 7 US dollars).
The Khalkabad congregation belongs to the Council of Churches (or unregistered
Baptists), which split from the All-Union Council of Baptists in 1961, when
further state-sponsored controls were introduced by the then Baptist
leadership. It has refused state registration ever since, believing that such
registration leads to unwarranted state interference. According to one of its
pastors in Moscow, it has 3,705 congregations throughout the former Soviet
Union.
Judge Batyrov insisted his decision to fine and imprison the Baptists was
correct. "I have acted strictly in accordance with the law," he told
Forum 18 from Pap on 21 August. "The law on religion in Uzbekistan forbids
the activity of unregistered religious organisations. The punishment for this
law-breaking is set out both in the administrative code and the criminal
code."
When Forum 18 commented that Uzbek courts customarily only hand down fines in
such cases without resorting to detention, Batyrov responded: "It is true
that the courts generally hand down more lenient sentences to such offenders.
But in our Pap district the number of such cases has increased lately and for
this reason I decided to sentence the offenders to a harsher punishment."