The court of Vahdat city found the well-known lawyer Buzurgmehr Yorov guilty and added another 10 years to his prison sentence. The court proceedings in the case of Buzurgmehr Yorov took place on July 10 at Detention Center No. 1 in Dushanbe. Authorities did not allow relatives of the political prisoner to attend the trial. […]
The court of Vahdat city found the well-known lawyer Buzurgmehr Yorov guilty and added another 10 years to his prison sentence.
The court proceedings in the case of Buzurgmehr Yorov took place on July 10 at Detention Center No. 1 in Dushanbe. Authorities did not allow relatives of the political prisoner to attend the trial.
The court found Buzurgmehr Yorov guilty of “large-scale fraud.” Yorov himself rejected the authorities’ accusations at previous court hearings.
Jamshed Yorov, chairman of the “Buzurgmehr” foundation and brother of the convicted lawyer Buzurgmehr Yorov, told Azda TV that this verdict was fabricated and cruel. According to him, the court proceedings were held behind closed doors, and Yorov did not have access to a lawyer.
It is reported that after eight years of imprisonment and the amnesty law, Buzurgmehr Yorov had 10 years and 2 months left in prison. Now, after the new verdict, he will spend 20 years and 2 months in places of deprivation of liberty. Of these, the first two years will be spent in a closed prison, and the remaining 18 in the Yavan colony.
On November 24, 2022, the political prisoner and well-known lawyer Buzurgmehr Yorov was transferred from the colony in Vahdat to a closed-type colony with a particularly strict regime, known as “the covered” in Dushanbe, for two years.
After that, the Investigative Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Tajikistan initiated yet another, already the fourth criminal case against Yorov. Later, Buzurgmehr Yorov was transferred to Detention Center No. 1 in Dushanbe.
The case was initiated based on a statement from a prisoner in the Vahdat colony, Hasan Hasanov. He claimed that Buzurgmehr Yorov received 42,500 somoni (over $4,000) for providing legal services but did nothing. Buzurgmehr Yorov denied receiving the money and called Hasanov’s statement “another slander.”
Relatives of Buzurgmehr Yorov described these accusations as politically motivated. According to them, Yorov’s case, like those of all opponents of the Rahmon regime or civil society activists, was fabricated in an atmosphere of lies, secrecy, using pressure and torture against suspects, witnesses, and their relatives.
The well-known Tajik human rights defender and political prisoner Buzurgmehr Yorov was arrested on September 28, 2015, when he took on the defense of members of the Islamic Renaissance Party of Tajikistan in court. He was charged with various offenses, including fraud, forgery of documents, and insulting the president. The court sentenced him to 28 years in prison. The human rights defender and his supporters rejected the charges and called the court ruling politically motivated.
Western countries and several international organizations have repeatedly called on the Tajik authorities to release Buzurgmehr Yorov from prison immediately and unconditionally. However, the authorities of the country have never taken into account the demands of international organizations.