On 7 October 2005, Mutabar Tadjibaeva was arrested on her way to Tashkent airport, to catch a connecting flight to Dublin, Ireland, where she was due to attend an international conference on human rights defenders. She was taken to Tashkent prison and would spend the next several months in solitary confinement. On 6 March 2006, Tadjibaeva was sentenced to eight years’ imprisonment on 17 different charges including “slander” and “membership of an illegal organisation”.