NOVOSIBIRSK. Aug 15 (Interfax) - Clerics of the Spiritual Muslim Board of the Asian Part of Russia, Ilkhom Merazhov and Komil Odilov, who were convicted by a Novosibirsk court of being involved with the outlawed Nurjalar international religious organization, are prepared to defend their rights at the international level.
"If the court rejects our appeal, we will be ready to go to the European Court of Human Rights," Merazhov told Interfax.
Speaking at a session of the Oktyabrsky District Court of Novosibirsk on Thursday, Merazhov said that neither the investigation nor the court had been able to offer any evidence proving either the two Muslim clerics' involvement with Nurjalar or the very fact of this organization's existence.
"There is no Nurjalar ideology. There is only Islam. It means that the spread of Islam has been banned," Merazhov said, stressing that his religious work was proceeding exclusively within the framework of the Spiritual Muslim Board of the Asian Part of Russia.
When prohibiting different religious books, Russian courts are often guided by loose interpretations of the law, while a lower court's guilty verdict handed down in this case includes terms that have no judicial meaning such as "personality transformation", "subjective reality change", etc, he said.
State Prosecutor Sergei Ageyev, for his part, told Interfax he still thought that the two Muslim clerics had been proven guilty and would ask the court to reject their appeal.
Investigators believe that Merazhov and Odilov were dragged into the activities of Nurjalar "by unidentified persons at a certain period of time in the past."
They accused Nurjalar of seeking to install a Muslim government that would rule the region under Sharia law.