Freedom Now: Buzurgmehr Yorov case

The case profile, published by Freedom Now, documents the prosecution of Tajik human rights lawyer Buzurgmehr Yorov (born 9 July 1971), arrested on 28 September 2015 and ultimately sentenced to 28 years in prison. According to the profile, Yorov worked as an investigator in the Department of Internal Affairs in Dushanbe, earned his law degree in 1997, and in 2007 founded the independent Sipar law firm. The report states that he represented figures including Hoji Akbar Turajonzoda (2011), Muhiddin Kabiri (2013), Fakhriddin Zokirov (2014), and was prevented from running in 2010 and 2015 elections for the Social Democratic Party. In early September 2015 he took on the defence of 13 members of the Islamic Renaissance Party of Tajikistan (IRPT) accused of orchestrating a failed coup. The profile states that on the same day the Supreme Court designated the IRPT a terrorist organisation, police arrested Yorov, raided his home and office without a warrant, and charged him with forgery, fraud, “arousing national, racial, local or religious hostility” and extremism. He was held in pre-trial detention for eight months, beaten and placed in solitary confinement. On 6 October 2016 he was sentenced to 23 years; on 16 March 2017, reading an 11th-century Persian poem before sentencing led to an additional two-year conviction for contempt and insulting an official. On 18 August 2017 he received a further 12 years for fraud and publicly insulting the president; combined sentence was set at 28 years. In May 2019 the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention found Tajikistan violated international law. His sentence was reduced by six years under a November 2019 amnesty and by a further four years in October 2021. In July 2023 he was convicted of additional fraud and given 10 more years. Yorov received the Czech Homo Homini Award in February 2020 and was shortlisted for the Václav Havel Prize in August 2019. Sources cited: Freedom Now case file, UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention opinion (June 2019), Lawyers for Lawyers, Hogan Lovells LLP, DLA Piper.