TAJIKISTAN: Conscientious objector freed, but another jailed

[Isabella]

Rustamjon Norov, a 22-year-old Jehovah's Witness from the capital Dushanbe, is being held in the northern city of Khujand awaiting trial to punish him for refusing military service on grounds of conscience. No trial date has yet been set. Prosecutors accuse him of falsifying his medical history to evade military service, charges he denies. He had offered to perform an alternative civilian service, but Tajikistan does not offer this. He faces two to five years' imprisonment if convicted.
 

The Assistant to Saidali Rakhmanzoda Chair of the Supreme Court's Military Collegium, refused to comment on its rejection of Nurov's appeal against pre-trial detention. He also refused to put Forum 18 through on 5 November to the Chair or the Judges who made the decision. He referred it to the international section of the Supreme Court (see below).

Asked why Tajikistan still has no alternative to compulsory military service and why the authorities continue punishing conscientious objectors, Khaydar Kadyrov, Chief of the Supreme Court's international section, replied: "I cannot comment on these questions because they are political. Our section is not competent to answer such questions" (see below).

The prosecution of Norov comes as another jailed conscientious objector, fellow Jehovah's Witness Jovidon Bobojonov, was freed on 1 November under a presidential prisoner amnesty. He had served nine months of a two-year prison term. His sentence was deemed to run from January 2020, even though he had been in army detention from October 2019, during which time he was tortured. That torture remains unpunished (see below).

Shodigul Moyonshoyeva, the responsible official for complaints from citizens at the General Prosecutor's Office in Dushanbe, declined to say why complaints about Bobojonov's torture were not investigated and why the responsible military officials have not been put on trial. "Sorry we are in the midst of disinfection works because of the pandemic," she told Forum 18 (see below).

Military service of two years is compulsory for almost all able-bodied young men between the ages of 16 and 27 (see below).

Jehovah's Witnesses are conscientious objectors to military service and their beliefs do not allow them to undertake any kind of activity supporting any country's military. But they are willing to undertake an alternative, totally civilian form of service, as is the right of all conscientious objectors to military service under international human rights law.

In defiance of its international human rights obligations, and despite repeated requests from the United Nations (UN) Human Rights Committee and UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, Tajikistan has not introduced a possibility for a genuinely civilian alternative service to the military conscription imposed on young men (see below).

http://www.forum18.org/archive.php?article_id=2615