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A driver from Vobkent district has been stripped of his licence for three years and fined 16.48 million soums after three successive Uzbek courts upheld a drink-driving conviction resting entirely on a breathalyser that was not on the official register of approved measuring instruments on the day it was used — and that contradicted the only laboratory evidence in the case, which found no alcohol in his blood or urine.
The case against Sh.R., as the driver is identified in court documents, has become the subject of a detailed legal challenge now lodged with the First Deputy Chairman of the Supreme Court. The challenge sets out six distinct violations of procedural and substantive law, each of which, it argues, would independently justify quashing the verdict. Together, they describe a pattern in which every tier of the judiciary reinforced rather than corrected the original error.
An Unregistered Device as the Sole Basis for Conviction
The Metrology Institute confirmed in writing — before the first-instance court had even convened — that the AlcoStop 8000S device bearing serial number A601627 was not in the state register on the date of the roadside check and therefore could not lawfully be used. Regulations on the procedure for establishing intoxication, registered with the Ministry of Justice under number 3099, require that only certified, authorised and calibrated instruments may be used. Neither the district court nor the regional court gave any legal assessment of that official letter: they neither accepted it as evidence nor formally rejected it.
The Bukhara branch of the Republican Centre for Forensic Medical Examination and Narcology conducted blood and urine analysis on samples taken approximately three hours after the roadside stop. The result was unambiguous: no ethyl alcohol detected. Expert L.Tokhtayev testified in court that alcohol traces remain detectable in blood and urine for up to three days. Had alcohol been present at the time of the check, it would have shown up. The courts set that scientific finding aside in favour of the breathalyser reading without explaining why.
The device’s own manufacturer-specified margin of error is also relevant. Once that margin is applied, the recorded reading of 0.155 mg/l falls below the legal threshold for intoxication. Expert testimony noted that such a reading can be produced by garlic or vinegar-based foods; the driver, on medical advice, consumes garlic regularly. The courts did not address this arithmetic.
Procedural Failures Compounded at Every Stage
The violations extend beyond the handling of the breathalyser evidence. Under paragraph 11 of the intoxication-testing regulations, when a driver contests a roadside result, the traffic officer is obliged to take that driver to a district medical facility authorised to conduct the examination. Paragraph 17 requires the examination to be completed within one hour. The appellate court’s own written ruling acknowledged that the driver was taken instead to a regional multi-profile medical centre that lacked the authority to conduct such testing. Having recorded that breach, the court then treated the time lost as a consequence attributable to the driver rather than to the officers who chose the wrong facility.
The regional court compounded the error by citing paragraph 33 of the regulations — which governs challenges to a completed medical opinion — as the basis for ruling that a two-hour window for re-examination had expired. In this case no lawful medical examination had taken place at all; the relevant provision was paragraph 11, not paragraph 33. Applying an inapplicable norm is, on its face, a violation of substantive law.
Most seriously, the appellate ruling misrepresented the expert’s testimony. The written decision implies that Tokhtayev said alcohol might not be detectable; his actual evidence was the opposite — that it would be detectable for up to three days, and that a reading of 0.155 mg/l could originate from food. The challenge notes that the court record and audio of the hearing can be checked against the written judgment.
A Constitutional Guarantee Inverted
Article 28 of Uzbekistan’s Constitution provides that any unresolved doubt regarding guilt must be resolved in the accused’s favour. The challenge argues that all three courts applied that guarantee in reverse: faced with a conflict between a device not on the register and a laboratory finding of no alcohol, each court chose the evidence pointing to guilt and left the contradiction unexplained.
The Supreme Court Plenum’s resolution No. 19 of 25 June 2024, paragraphs 16 and 17, sets out requirements for the assessment of evidence and the reasoning of judgments. Article 321 of the Code of Administrative Procedure requires a decision to be quashed when the case has been examined one-sidedly and the ruling does not correspond to the established facts. The challenge contends that both standards were breached at every level.
The Supreme Court judge who received the initial supervisory complaint declined to refer it to the supervisory panel. The application now before the First Deputy Chairman asks for that refusal to be overturned, for the case to be reheard by the supervisory panel on the merits, and for proceedings to be terminated under Article 271, paragraph 1 of the procedural code.
The practical stakes reach beyond one driver. Thousands of motorists pass through breathalyser checks daily. If courts continue to treat readings from unregistered devices as superior to laboratory findings, any instrument malfunction or procedural shortcut at the roadside becomes effectively unreviewable — regardless of what the science shows.