Karakalpakstan's Right to Secede: Article 74, Now Article 89

It's one sentence long. "The Republic of Karakalpakstan shall have the right to secede from the Republic of Uzbekistan on the basis of a nation-wide referendum held by the people of Karakalpakstan." For thirty years that sentence was Article 74 of Uzbekistan's constitution. Since 2023 it has been Article 89, and in between it came within a few days of being deleted.

The clause is unusual. Slavomír Horák and Martin Lepič, in a 2025 paper in Nationalities Papers, describe a secession right of this kind as unique among the former Soviet autonomies. Karakalpakstan, a desert republic covering roughly a third of Uzbekistan's territory, does, at least on paper.

What the constitution actually says

The Karakalpakstan chapter is short, six articles, and the wording barely changed between the two constitutions. The numbers did, because the 2023 text is much longer and everything shifted down.

Subject	1992 constitution	2023 constitution
"Sovereign Republic of Karakalpakstan" is part of Uzbekistan	Art. 70	Art. 85
Own constitution, which must conform to Uzbekistan's	Art. 71	Art. 86
Uzbek laws binding on its territory	Art. 72	Art. 87
Borders can't change without its consent	Art. 73	Art. 88
Right to secede by referendum	Art. 74	Art. 89
Relations governed by treaties and agreements	Art. 75	Art. 90

So if you read "Article 74" in coverage of the 2022 protests, that's the old numbering and it was correct at the time. Anything written after 30 April 2023, when voters approved the new constitution, should say Article 89. Karakalpakstan's own constitution of 1993 carries matching language in its first article, according to Horák and Lepič.

Notice what's missing. The clause gives a right but no procedure. It doesn't say who can call the referendum, what turnout or majority counts, or who counts as "the people of Karakalpakstan". We found no implementing law that fills that gap. A right with no mechanism is easy to keep in a constitution and very hard to use.

Where it came from

The clause is a leftover of the Soviet collapse. Karakalpakstan had been an autonomous republic inside the Uzbek SSR since 1936 (our guide to the region has the earlier history). In 1990, as Moscow's grip loosened, its parliament adopted a declaration of state sovereignty, as The Diplomat's Catherine Putz recounts. Uzbekistan's 1992 constitution then wrote the sovereignty wording and the secession right into its own text.

There was also a deal. Horák and Lepič describe a 1993 agreement under which Karakalpakstan joined Uzbekistan for the following 20 years. Bruce Pannier, a veteran Central Asia journalist, told The Diplomat that Islam Karimov more or less said "fine for now" and agreed to revisit it in two decades, and that he doesn't think Tashkent ever meant to let the region go.

When 2013 approached, groups such as the exiled Alga Karakalpakstan movement started pointing at the calendar. By then, Pannier says, the government was already cracking down on anyone talking about secession. No independence referendum has ever been held.

That's the gap at the heart of this story. The constitution protects the right to leave. The criminal code punishes people who campaign for it. Steve Swerdlow, a human rights scholar at the University of Southern California, pointed The Diplomat to vague provisions such as Article 159 of the Criminal Code (encroachment on the constitutional order), which he says have been used against peaceful critics under both Karimov and Mirziyoyev.

The draft that tried to remove it

On 25 June 2022, according to Human Rights Watch, the government published draft amendments to the constitution for public discussion. Among many other changes, the Karakalpakstan chapter would have lost the reference to the republic's sovereignty and the right to a secession referendum. Internet disruption in the region began two days later, on 27 June.

What followed took about a week. Protests began in Nukus on 1 July. On 2 July President Shavkat Mirziyoyev flew to Nukus and announced that Articles 70, 71, 72, 74 and 75 would stay as they were. His office said he had taken into account Karakalpakstan's "unique ethnic and cultural characteristics" and its "special legal status". A state of emergency ran until 21 July.

The official toll was 21 dead, four of them security officers, and prosecutors said 516 people had been detained. HRW concluded that security forces "unjustifiably used lethal force" against mainly peaceful demonstrators. The regional authorities blamed a "criminal group" trying to seize government buildings, and Mirziyoyev spoke of "foreign forces". The street events themselves are covered in our Karakalpakstan guide and, from the people's side, in Karakalpak language, epics and yurts, so we won't repeat them here.

After 2023: the clause stays, the cases continue

The new constitution kept the whole chapter. That's the part the government points to: the right was never removed.

The prosecutions are the other part. In January 2023 a court in Bukhara convicted 22 defendants; Dauletmurat Tazhimuratov, a Karakalpak lawyer and journalist who had urged people to vote "no" and called a rally, received 16 years. In May 2023 two diaspora activists were convicted in absentia, Aman Sagidullayev (18 years; he lives in Norway) and Neitbay Urazbayev (12 years; a Kazakh citizen).

On 1 May 2026 a court convicted Tazhimuratov again, this time of "actions disrupting the work of a penal institution", and gave him five more years. HRW reports that his combined sentence now stands at 18.5 years, not the 21 you might expect from adding the two numbers, and that he was denied a lawyer of his choosing. The UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention had already found his detention arbitrary.

Is the right to secede meaningful, then? Our view: as a legal instrument, barely. There's no procedure, and campaigning for its use has led to long prison terms. As a symbol, very. Horák and Lepič argue from fieldwork in Nukus and Kungrad that the 2022 protests weren't separatist at all; people broadly saw their future inside Uzbekistan. What they objected to was losing a status, even a nominal one. A clause nobody expects to use turned out to be worth defending.

For travellers none of this changes the practicalities. Karakalpakstan needs no separate permit, and Nukus is reached on the same visa as the rest of the country. But it helps to know that for many people there, "sovereign republic" isn't a dusty phrase. It's the line they went out to defend.

Sources

This article is for general information and is not legal advice.