Kamil Ruziyev took cases nobody else would and made plenty of enemies along the way.
Last month a photograph circulated on Kyrgyz social media showing a woman’s entire face swollen, with bruises that enclosed both eyes and blood speckled around her mouth.
The life of a human rights defender in Central Asia is rarely free of complications. Meet Kamil Ruziyev, a small-town advocate the local police are trying to silence. https://t.co/U0sXVp2mE6
— Eurasianet (@eurasianet) June 30, 2022
The woman in the photo, Aizat Usenbayeva, told Eurasianet that it was the eighth time her husband had beaten her.
This time, as he rained down blows on her in the street outside her house, she believed he would finally follow through on his threat to kill her.
Luckily, he was interrupted by a passerby.
Usenbayeva, who is disabled, summoned the strength to phone police in the provincial city of Karakol later that day. Officers took her husband in for questioning, but he was released the same day.
Arrest of activist Kamil Ruziyev in Karakol, #Kyrgyzstan, likely in retaliation of his complaint against State National Security GKNB, is worrying sign that the screw is tightening on civil society.https://t.co/DQRIzHynoc pic.twitter.com/FyVr9BE3hp
— Philippe Dam (@philippe_dam) June 3, 2020
Police only held him overnight several days later after Kamil Ruziyev, a crusading lawyer who has been facing jail time for the last two years, publicized the case by posting the photo online and giving interviews to the media.
“I met Kamil Ruziyev out of chance. Probably God sent him to me to keep me alive,” Usenbayeva told Eurasianet.
The life of a rights defender in Central Asia is rarely free of complications.
For all the words of gratitude from clients on one side of a crooked justice system, there are threats and worse from its enforcers, who don’t like seeing their impunity challenged.
State scrutiny is particularly intense for small-town advocates, whose support networks tend to be thinner than those of their colleagues in major political centers.
The most obvious example is the tragic fate of Azimjan Askarov, who was in 2010 convicted to life imprisonment, ostensibly for the murder of a policeman during ethnic unrest in the south of the country, among other charges.
Supporters of Askarov, an ethnic Uzbek, called the case revenge for his campaigning on behalf of citizens who suffered at the hands of police in the town of Bazar-Korgon, where he lived.
Askarov died in jail in July 2020. He was 69.
The accusations against Ruziyev took shape a few months before Askarov’s death and have persisted despite a change in the nation’s leadership.
The rights lawyer who dared challenge Kyrgyzstan’s security services
