Azattyk’s lawyers asked the court to dismiss the ministry’s claim, as the Ministry of Culture did not provide evidence that Nastoyashcheye Vremya’s material contains elements of inciting ethnic hatred or war propaganda.
Then representatives of the Ministry of Culture appealed to the court with a request to conduct a linguistic examination of the TV channel’s plot for inciting ethnic hatred and war propaganda.
Azattyk’s lawyers said that they needed to study the submitted petition, noting that the agency had not previously notified the defendants of their interest in conducting an examination. As a result, the judge postponed the process to March 24.
In October 2022, the Ministry of Culture blocked the Azattyk website for two months due to allegedly “inaccurate information” about the September border conflict, which the department considered “contrary to the national interests of Kyrgyzstan.”
The Ministry of Culture reported that the video footage of the Current Time TV channel (a subordinate structure of Radio Liberty) titled “Heavy fighting on the border of Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan” contains “elements of hate speech, unconfirmed information about the alleged attack by the Kyrgyz side on Tajikistan.”
Later, the department clarified that the blocking of the site is indefinite until the publication removes the material that they consider unreliable.
At that time, the president of the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty media corporation, Jamie Fly, said that he considered the blocking of the Azattyk website to be persecution of free media.
Already in January 2023, the Ministry of Culture filed a lawsuit to terminate the activities of the Azattyk Media institution as a media outlet. They cited the fact that the publication never removed the controversial material as the reason for the lawsuit.
In response, Fly said they would use “every legal means available to keep their operations in the country”.