Browsing: Access to Information

A visually impaired Tashkent resident was denied a routine power of attorney on July 24 because a 2019 Ministry of Justice regulation prohibits the facsimile signatures that national disability law explicitly authorises. The Tashkent City Department of Justice defended the refusal, citing a Cabinet of Ministers resolution that requires a specialist of a profession that does not officially exist.

Uzbekistan has quietly built one of Central Asia’s largest rosters of naturalized Russian athletes, spanning rowing, tennis, figure skating, swimming and fencing. The strategy delivers medals but raises hard questions about what it costs domestic talent and the sports budgets meant to develop it.

The Competition Committee reviewed 878 draft regulatory acts submitted through the government’s unified legislative portal in 2025 and found that 425 — nearly half — contained provisions contradicting competition law. The rate was highest for Presidential-level acts, where 147 of 239 drafts, or 61.5%, were flagged.

A visually impaired resident of Karakul district identified and refused a 10 million soum cash demand linked to a land subsidy application after listening to an audio guide on anti-corruption law — the first practical test of a legal literacy project that has since reached more than 40,000 people across Uzbekistan.

A regional round table convened in Tashkent on 29 November 2022 brought together police, prosecutors and legal educators from four Central Asian countries to examine how corruption and institutional shortcomings obstruct the protection of women and girls from violence.

The Ministry of Finance and UNDP convened an international forum in Tashkent on 30 August 2022 to assess the expansion of participatory budgeting, after the first 2022 cycle saw 6.7 million citizens vote on more than 69,000 proposals, resulting in 1.2 trillion soums allocated to 2,354 winning projects from district and city budgets.

A federal judge in California has ordered the Trump administration to resume the Diversity Visa lottery, setting a registration window opening no later than November 1 and results by December 3, after a legal challenge by immigration law firm Red Eagle Law.

A protocol from an extraordinary general meeting of UzPost shareholders has confirmed that the national postal operator’s 92.9% state stake was transferred to a Wildberries subsidiary under trust management — a fact the head of the State Assets Management Agency publicly denied as recently as October 8.

Representatives of non-governmental organizations from all 14 regions of Uzbekistan have completed a structured training program on public oversight, open data analysis, and anti-corruption legislative review, under a project jointly implemented by the Anti-Corruption Agency and international partners from Latvia and Kyrgyzstan.

IPU President Tulia Ackson told young parliamentarians gathered in Samarkand that they must use legislative tools, budget decisions, and parliamentary oversight to demand accountability for human rights violations, warning that armed conflicts have reached their highest level since World War II.