On July 24, a man named Abdullo, who has had a visual impairment since birth and holds a Group I disability classification, visited a notary office in Tashkent’s Yashnabad district accompanied by his son. His request was straightforward: a power of attorney authorising another person to collect a bank card on his behalf. The notary refused to process the document, insisting that Abdullo first produce a representative from the Society of the Blind of Uzbekistan. When Abdullo’s family contacted the Notary Chamber by phone to challenge the requirement, a chamber employee asked whether his blindness was congenital or acquired — and confirmed that the intermediary requirement applied specifically because he had been blind from birth.
The incident, documented in a detailed analysis published by Gazeta.uz and co-authored by two disability-rights specialists, is presented not as an isolated error but as the predictable outcome of a structural legal conflict. A subordinate departmental regulation is being applied by notaries across the country in direct contradiction of a national law that explicitly grants visually impaired citizens the right to use a facsimile signature — a specially made stamp that replaces a handwritten signature — as a legally valid substitute.
The Legal Conflict at the Centre of the Problem
Article 29 of the Law On the Rights of Persons with Disabilities states that the facsimile signature of a person with a disability is recognised as an official signature carrying full legal force. Facsimile use is standard practice internationally and is the recognised mechanism for enabling people with visual impairments to sign documents independently, without relying on a third party.
Notaries, however, do not apply this provision. Instead, they follow paragraph 9 of the Ministry of Justice’s 2019 regulation on the procedure for performing notarial acts, which categorically prohibits the acceptance of documents bearing a facsimile signature. The result is a direct collision between a national law and a subordinate departmental act — a collision that notaries are resolving in favour of the lower-ranking document.
Under the Law On Normative Legal Acts, departmental regulations are subordinate acts and cannot contradict laws. The analysis argues that by applying the 2019 regulation rather than the disability rights law, notaries are also violating Article 15 of the Constitution, which establishes the unconditional supremacy of laws over subordinate acts.
The ‘Typhlo-Interpreter’ Requirement and Its Contradictions
To work around its own ban on facsimile signatures, the notarial regulation offers an alternative under paragraph 8: a proxy — described as a sighted person — may sign on behalf of the visually impaired applicant in the presence of a notary, under video recording. In practice, notaries have been directing blind citizens specifically to the Society of the Blind to find this proxy.
The analysis identifies several layers of incoherence in this arrangement. The majority of the Society of the Blind’s own employees are themselves visually impaired, making them unsuitable as sighted proxies. Not all visually impaired people are members of the organisation. And no provision of law assigns the Society of the Blind any formal role as a mandatory intermediary between citizens and state services. Part 3 of Article 18 of the Law On Non-Governmental Non-Profit Organisations explicitly prohibits making the exercise of citizens’ rights conditional on membership or participation in any particular NGO.
When Abdullo submitted a complaint through the President’s virtual reception, the Tashkent City Department of Justice responded with a letter signed by Deputy Head J. Khudoyorov. Rather than acknowledging a legal conflict, the department defended the notary’s conduct by citing Cabinet of Ministers Resolution No. 726 of 2020, which requires the presence of a typhlo-interpreter — a specialist whose credentials must be confirmed by a power of attorney and an official identity card issued exclusively by the Society of the Blind. The response concluded that the notary had merely been explaining the regulation, and that Abdullo had incorrectly understood this as discrimination.
The analysis points out that the profession of typhlo-interpreter does not officially exist in Uzbekistan. Audio describers — specialists who describe visual content for blind audiences — are a recognised category, but they are distinct from what the regulation appears to envision. The Society of the Blind has no legal authority, training infrastructure, or certification mechanism to produce or accredit specialists of any kind. Resolution No. 726 itself contains a further anomaly: it states that a typhlo-interpreter is not required if the notary knows how to operate a certain device intended for a blind citizen, without specifying what that device is. The analysis notes that no notary in the country receives training in specialised assistive technology for the visually impaired, meaning the provision creates a permanent loophole that defaults to sending blind citizens away.
Civil Rights Consequences: Wills, Property and Confidentiality
The practical consequences extend beyond inconvenience. Articles 1127 and 1128 of the Civil Code of Uzbekistan guarantee every citizen the right to the secrecy of a will — the principle that no one should know the contents of a testamentary document until the designated time. When a visually impaired person is compelled to use a third-party proxy to sign a will, that proxy necessarily learns the document’s contents. The confidentiality guaranteed by law is eliminated entirely. A blind citizen is effectively stripped of the right to dispose of their own property — a house, savings, or other assets — without the knowledge of a stranger.
The analysis also challenges the security rationale sometimes offered for banning facsimile signatures. The Central Bank of Uzbekistan resolved the same question in the financial sector through paragraph 30 of Resolution No. 3420, which explicitly permits facsimile signatures when a person with a disability cannot sign by hand, including for opening accounts and executing banking documents. Priority service and remote contract-signing arrangements for persons with disabilities have also been introduced in the banking sector. The notary system’s continued refusal to adopt equivalent standards is, the analysis argues, inconsistent with the approach already taken by a sector that handles considerably greater financial risk.
International Obligations and Systemic Recommendations
Uzbekistan ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in 2021. The Convention prohibits discrimination on the basis of disability and requires states to provide reasonable accommodation — adjustments that enable people with disabilities to use services on an equal basis with others. The analysis argues that permitting facsimile signatures in notarial practice is precisely the kind of reasonable accommodation the Convention mandates, and that denying it constitutes discrimination under international law binding on state bodies including the Ministry of Justice and the Notary Chamber.
The analysis, co-authored by Dilmurad Yusupov — a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Tokyo with a doctorate from the University of Sussex — and Abdullo Abdukhalilov — a Doctor of Sociological Sciences, acting professor at the National University of Uzbekistan, and Deputy Chairperson for Strategic Planning at the Association of Disabled People of Uzbekistan — sets out a series of concrete recommendations. These include formally recognising paragraph 9 of the 2019 notarial procedure regulation and paragraph 18 of Cabinet of Ministers Resolution No. 726 as discriminatory and contrary to the disability rights law; officially permitting facsimile signatures for all notarial services; ending the requirement to seek representatives exclusively from the Society of the Blind; removing references to non-existent professions and undefined devices from normative acts; and making disability-awareness training mandatory for notary staff, with direct involvement of disabled people’s organisations in drafting future regulations.
The conflict of interest embedded in the current complaints process compounds the problem. A complaint about regulations developed by the Ministry of Justice is reviewed by a department of that same ministry. The Tashkent City Department of Justice’s response — which dismissed Abdullo’s account of discrimination rather than engaging with the legal hierarchy — illustrates how the system is structured to defend its own rules rather than assess their legality.
