As of September 2019, the last time it addressed the issue, the Uzbek government said there were no ongoing criminal investigations involving violence against LGBT people. Uzbekistan has yet to adopt a comprehensive anti-discrimination law that includes sexual orientation and gender identity as a protected ground. Uzbek law has no provision for hate crimes, nor can crimes be prosecuted as aggravated offenses if they are motivated by hatred based on discrimination. “Because of the violence and discrimination that LGBT people are subjected to, we had to stop most of projects, news feeds or groups online,” one activist said, describing the climate of fear’s chilling effect on activism. Two of them said they had to pay a bribe to the police. Police opened an investigation, and later a man was convicted for Shavkatov’s “intentional murder.”įive men also told Human Rights Watch that they had paid bribes of up to the equivalent of US$1,000 to keep them from disclosing the men’s sexual orientation to family members or the public. Media outlets in Uzbekistan also reported on the shocking case of Shokir Shavkatov, a 25-year-old man who was found stabbed to death in his apartment in September 2019, just days after he came out as gay on his Instagram page. After an Istanbul-based LGBT activist from Uzbekistan, Shohruh Salimov, issued a video appeal in August 2019 urging President Mirziyoyev to protect the lives of LGBT people in Uzbekistan, police visited his relatives’ home and told them they were looking for him to arrest him, media reported. In a February 2020 report, the Eurasian Coalition on Health, Rights, Gender and Sexual Diversity (ECOM), an alliance of nongovernmental organizations working on LGBT issues, citing local activists, documented that police in Uzbekistan harassed gay men, detaining and interrogating several of them between August 15 and September 15, 2019. One activist said that LGBT crime survivors do not seek protection from police “fearing they will be outed, subjected to bullying and insults by the authorities. Gay men who face human rights abuses have few legal remedies. Uzbekistan is considering a new Criminal Code, yet the draft published on February 22, 2021, retains the offense, in a new article, 154, with the wording unchanged. While it seems that prosecutions based on article 120 are rare, police in Uzbekistan continue to use it to arbitrarily detain and threaten people, who may ultimately be prosecuted on other charges, such as prostitution. Turkmenistan has said that it will reconsider its law. Only two states in the former Soviet Union, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, still criminalize consensual same-sex conduct. The men interviewed, who asked to remain anonymous, said that they faced arbitrary arrests, threats, extortion, psychological pressure, and physical attacks by both police and non-state actors for being gay.Īrticle 120 is a carry-over from Uzbekistan’s Soviet past and is problematic because it violates fundamental rights protected under international law, such as to privacy and bodily autonomy, and is blatantly discriminatory. Human Rights Watch interviewed nine gay men and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) activists and reviewed other material, such as videos depicting and encouraging humiliation, insults, beatings, or sexual abuse of gay men that were posted online and in homophobic social media groups, such as TashGangs. “Uzbekistan should definitively turn a page from its abusive past and remove this rights-violating and outdated provision from its new Criminal Code.” “Article 120, and abuses linked to it, has placed gay and bisexual men in Uzbekistan in a deeply vulnerable and marginalized position, leaving them with almost no protection from harassment by police and others,” said Hugh Williamson, director of the Europe and Central Asia division at Human Rights Watch. © 2013 Mel Longhurst/VWPics via AP Images
The Senate of the Republic of Uzbekistan, Independence Square, Mustakillik Maydoni, Tashkent, Uzbekistan.