TASHKENT, Uzbekistan — At a January hearing in her absence, Natalya Pitirimova, accountant for the Bible Society of Uzbekistan, was fined for violating procedures over the import of two shipments of Bibles and children’s Bibles in 2008 and 2010.
The state Religious Affairs Committee, which operates Uzbekistan’s strict prior compulsory censorship of all religious literature, has refused to release the Bibles despite successive appeals from Christian churches. Judge Dilshod Suleymanov also ordered that the Bible society return the shipments — totaling nearly 15,000 copies — to Russia at its own expense.
The judge claimed that the “Bible society did not present requests on time to the Religious Affairs Committee from churches in Uzbekistan that they need the literature, and subsequently as time passed, this violated customs procedures.” Justice Ministry officials told the Bible society, “There is no need to import Bibles into Uzbekistan since there’s an electronic version on the Internet.”
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