Additional four years have been added to a jail term of Tajik mixed-martial-arts (MMA) fighter and blogger Chorshanbe Chorshanbiyev after he was found guilty of violation of penal colony’s internal regulations.
Radio Liberty’s Tajik Service, known locally as Radio Ozodi, reported on November 19 that according to some sources, the new charges against Chorshanbiyev involve violations of the penal colony’s internal regulations.
However, a source in Tajikistan’s law enforcement stated that the blogger was involved in a fight in the penal colony.
Chorshanbe Chorshanbiyev, a Tajik national, was deported from Russia, where he had lived for many years, in late December of 2021 after he was caught speeding by Moscow police. Upon arrival in Tajikistan on December 30, 2021, however, he was taken into custody. This sequence of events has sparked suspicions that the deportation was effected at the request of the Tajik authorities. Therefore, some journalists noted that Chorshanbiyev was not deported, but rather extradited.
The charge against Chorshanbe stemmed from a video statement he made in the wake of violent protests in Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Region (GBAO)'s capital, Khorog, which broke out in November 2021 after security forces fatally wounded a local man wanted on charges of kidnapping.
In his video statement, Chorshanbiyev condemned the actions of security forces that led to the death of the man and called on Tajiks "and all the peoples of the country to rise against injustice, unjust deaths of innocent people."
Ms. Yelizaveta Koltunova of the Institute of Linguistics and Journalism in the Russian city of Nizhny Novgorod testified that Chorshanbiyev's statement did not contain any “psychosocial or linguistic elements of calls for violence, including disruption of the foundations of the society and state."
The court in Dushanbe’s Ismoili Somoni district, however, decided to send Chorshanbiyev's video statement for additional linguistic studies.
Initially, the prosecution charged him under two articles of Tajikistan’s Criminal Code: Article 189 – incitement of social, racial, national, regional, or religious enmity; and Article 307 – public calls for the violent overthrow of the constitutional order of the Republic of Tajikistan. During the investigation, the first charge brought against him was dropped.
On May 13, 2022, the court sentenced Chorshanbe to 8 ½ years in prison. The sentence followed his conviction on charges of public calls for forced change of Tajikistan’s constitutional order through Internet.
According to his lawyers, Chorshanbe told the court that he “had no intention of destabilizing the situation”.
