Uzbekistan is one of Central Asia’s most brutal dictatorship, jailing people for simple messages on Facebook. Svetlana Vorobyeva had this information in Human Rights Watch. Here is an excerpt:

A court in Uzbekistan has sentenced a Muslim blogger to seven and a half years in prison for something many people do every day: posting an innocuous message on Facebook.

The criminal court in Tashkent’s Almazar district on January 26 found Muslim blogger and government critic, Fazilhoja Arifhojaev, guilty of threatening public security by reposting and commenting on a social media post that had questioned whether it was appropriate for a Muslim to congratulate non-Muslims on their religious holidays.

Arifhojaev was initially detained at the end of June last year on petty hooliganism charges, and sentenced to 15 days in detention. Instead of releasing him when his sentence ended the authorities charged him under criminal code article 244-1, part 3 (d) for “distributing or displaying materials containing a threat to public security and public order using mass media or telecommunication, or the Internet.”

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