Less than a week after Kyrgyzstan’s much lauded democratic elections, new waves of violence are destroying any semblance of due process in the country’s tortured south.

More than 150 lawyers defending ethnic Uzbeks in cases linked to June’s deadly interethnic clashes said Friday that they can no longer represent their clients due to numerous physical attacks against them and threats against their loved ones, according to Ferghana.ru. One of them, Kubanychbek Zhoroyev, said that over the past three days alone, six lawyers have been beaten at trials in Osh, while judges and prosecutors did not intervene.
The unruly mobs responsible for the attacks have typically been identified as relatives of ethnic Kyrgyz victims of the crimes being prosecuted, but some observers are skeptical:

Trial lawyer Dinara Turdumatova, who was also beaten in court, expressed some doubt that the assailants really were relatives of the dead and aggrieved. According to her, the same group of aggressively inclined women (40-50 people) appears at various trials and attacks lawyers.

The same week, three brutal attacks against ethnic Uzbek defendants and their relatives left several people in need of medical attention, with bloodied faces and broken bones. 
Whoever these mobs are and regardless of their motives, they are clearly blocking defendants’ access to justice. The problem of a weak court system is not new in Kyrgyzstan: Two years ago, International Crisis Group released a report concluding that “Kyrgyzstan’s judiciary is failing to act as a neutral arbiter of political disputes or as a fair channel for economic arbitration. It requires significant reform to gain the trust of the public and to assert its role as an independent branch of government.”
June’s bloodshed in the south, the shoddy police work that followed and the recent attacks show that the quality of the court system hasn’t improved much. 
"The wounds from the June violence are still deep and raw," Ole Solvang, an emergencies researcher with Human Rights Watch, said in the group’s October 13 news release. "Fair trials can help heal those wounds, but mob justice and fundamentally flawed investigations will only make things worse."