An Uzbekistan court has sentenced a Muslim blogger critical of the government to 7 1/2 years in jail over sharing a Facebook post, his lawyer said Thursday.
Activists have accused the authorities of tightly controlling religion in the ex-Soviet country, where more than 90% of around 35 million people are Muslim.
A district court in the capital Tashkent on Wednesday found blogger Fazilhoja Arifhojaev guilty of "production, storage, distribution or display of materials that threaten public safety and public order," his lawyer Sergei Mayorov told Agence France-Presse (AFP).
Mayorov said the sole focus of the trial was a Facebook post from March 2021 that questioned whether it was appropriate for Muslims to congratulate followers of other religions on non-Islamic holidays.
"This was the only crime for which he was tried," Mayorov said. "The state experts said it showed he was spreading religious fundamentalism."
Mayorov added that Arifhojayev did not even write the post, which he had instead reposted.
He said that the author – another Facebook user – had since deleted the original.
"The investigators made no effort to get in touch with the original author," Mayorov said.
Human Rights Watch in December raised fears that Arifhojayev had been mistreated in prison, and described the blogger as "well-known for criticizing the Uzbek government's restrictive religious policies."
During his more than five years in office, Uzbekistan’s President Shavkat Mirziyoyev has been credited with allowing some limited religious freedoms.
Mirziyoyev's initial reform drive raised hopes that his government might move away from the repressions associated with his long-ruling predecessor and mentor Islam Karimov, but rights groups have regularly flagged evidence of backsliding in recent years.
Last year, a court in the provincial city of Termez handed a 6 1/2 year sentence to video blogger Otabek Sattoriy for extortion and libel after he produced a string of reports critical of local authorities.
