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Uzbekistan: Baptists Forced
To Pay For Own Imprisonment
( F18News) -- Five Baptist men sentenced to ten days' imprisonment 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 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 August 15 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 hearing the next day, 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 (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 (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. "I have acted strictly in accordance with the law," Judge Batyrov told Forum 18 from Pap. "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."
© 2003 Forum 18 News Service
© 2003 Maranatha Christian News Service
Posts: 4684 | From: Southern Black Hills of South Dakota | Registered: Jun 2002
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