What Is a Mahalla, Legally? From the 1993 Law to Mahalla Seven

In October 2024 the head of the Association of Mahallas of Uzbekistan gave two numbers to visiting journalists, as reported by Gazeta.uz: 9,452 mahallas across 208 districts and cities, and 51,137 people working in what the government calls the "mahalla seven". That second figure is the one to hold on to. A neighbourhood doesn't need fifty thousand staff. An arm of the state does.

Our guide to the mahalla as a neighbourhood covers the lanes, the courtyards, the weddings and the gossip. This piece is about the other mahalla: the one that exists on paper, in the constitution and in a stack of laws and decrees, and that has been given more jobs almost every year since independence.

The legal skeleton

The founding text is the Law "On Bodies of Citizens' Self-Government", first adopted on 2 September 1993. It was rewritten in a new edition on 14 April 1999 and again on 22 April 2013 (law ZRU-350), and it has been amended many times since. People still call it the Mahalla Law.

Above it sits the constitution. The 1992 text (Article 105) described the self-governing bodies as assemblies of citizens electing a chairman, the aksakal, and his advisers for two and a half years. The 2023 constitution moved the clause to Article 127 and kept the core idea: gatherings of citizens in towns, villages and the makhallas of cities, each electing a chairperson.

So formally the mahalla is not a government office. It's a fuqarolar yig'ini, a citizens' assembly, which is why the office in any residential district carries a sign ending in "MFY". The assembly elects a chair (rais), who runs a small council.

That's the theory. The practice has been drifting away from it for thirty years.

Elected, but approved

Eric Sievers, a legal scholar who did fieldwork in Uzbek mahallas in 1998 and 1999, described the chair's selection as a mix of appointment by district government, internal voting and consensus. Human Rights Watch reported in 2003 that the district hokim had to approve the committee's choice. The current law says the chair and advisers are elected "in agreement with" the hokim. That phrase does a lot of work.

Money follows the same pattern. The 1999 edition let the chair be paid from the assembly's own funds or from the local budget, and Sievers noted that by the time he wrote (2002) chairs and secretaries were receiving state salaries. He coined the word "mahallization" for what was happening: jobs once done by specialised state agencies being pushed down to the neighbourhood, with the neighbourhood's own authority thinning as its official workload grew.

The job list

Read Article 12 of the law and the mahalla looks less like a residents' association and more like a small municipal department with a social-work unit bolted on. The assembly is told, among other things, to:

decide on material help for low-income families;
take measures to strengthen "the spiritual and moral atmosphere in the family" and protect women's interests;
help law-enforcement bodies keep public order and prevent offences;
run social and work rehabilitation, with adaptation centres, for people released from prison;
promote employment, including home-based work;
take measures to stop the activity of unregistered religious organisations.

The family clause is where divorce comes in. Sievers recorded that courts hearing a divorce often wanted a letter from the rais confirming that local mediation had failed before they'd proceed. For a couple, that means the neighbourhood chair has a formal part in ending a marriage. Is that community care or pressure to stay together? Depends on the couple, honestly, and on the chair. Reconciliation is also how more than half of domestic violence cases ended in one UNDP-backed sample of court documents.

Welfare was the first big state job handed over. Sievers, citing a 1998 UNDP-linked study, gave the scale: mahalla-allocated social assistance reached about 11% of families a year (598,072 households in 1997), and from 1997 child benefits also ran through the mahalla. A body that decides who gets help necessarily knows a lot about everyone.

The 1999 turn: posbons and lists

Days after the 1999 edition passed, the government created the posbon, a state-paid neighbourhood guard working with the committee and the police. HRW's 2003 report "From House to House" found one Tashkent mahalla of about 3,400 residents with nine posbons, and another of about 3,000 with four.

The same report described committees keeping detailed lists of residents under headings such as "drug users", "alcoholics", "scandalous families" and "children who do not listen to their parents", and holding meetings with police to warn residents against practising religion outside state-approved institutions. HRW quoted a deputy chair: "We know everyone in the mahalla."

The government's stated reasoning was about crime prevention. President Islam Karimov told parliament on 22 January 2000 that mahalla committees should "detect reasons and circumstances conducive to committing crimes" in residential areas. The Tashkent bombings of February 1999 were still fresh.

From five to seven

Under Shavkat Mirziyoyev, president since 2016, the mahalla has grown again, with a friendlier vocabulary. A Ministry for Mahalla and Family Support was set up in 2020. A "mahalla budget" system followed at the end of 2022. And the neighbourhood acquired a team.

First came the "mahalla five" (mahalla beshligi): the chair plus a hokim's assistant, a youth leader, a women's activist and a police prevention inspector. We couldn't pin down one founding decree; the posts were added separately in the early 2020s (the youth-leader system, for instance, was set by a resolution of 19 January 2022). On 26 September 2023 the president announced the five would become seven, adding a tax inspector and a social worker, and that more than 70 local issues would now be decided at mahalla level.

The legal framework came three months later. On 21 December 2023 the president signed decree UP-209, which defined the mahalla as the "primary link" for solving residents' problems and set up the Association of Mahallas of Uzbekistan, and resolution PP-402 on how that association and mahalla management would work. The association was formally created in January 2024 (sources give 17 or 18 January). From 1 January 2024 the seven's bonuses were tied to KPI scores, with the chair allowed to award 20% of each colleague's rating.

Date	Step
2 Sep 1993	First Law on Bodies of Citizens' Self-Government
14 Apr 1999	New edition; posbon guards created days later
22 Apr 2013	Current edition of the law (ZRU-350)
18 Feb 2020	Ministry for Mahalla and Family Support organised
26 Sep 2023	"Mahalla five" expanded to seven
21 Dec 2023	Decree UP-209 and resolution PP-402; Association of Mahallas
Jan 2024	Association formally created; KPI-linked pay for the seven

It hasn't all gone smoothly by the government's own account. In October 2025 Mirziyoyev complained that members of the seven spent half their working time in meetings, and that about 1,700 of them travelled 20 to 30 km a day to reach the mahalla they were meant to serve. His fix: a ban on separate departmental meetings with them. In July 2026 he said chairs would get the power to put land up for auction for private kindergartens, schools and clinics.

The December 2023 decree also ordered a new version of the Mahalla Law and, according to Gazeta.uz, proposed longer terms for chairs. We couldn't confirm that the new law has been adopted, so treat the 2013 edition, as amended, as the text in force.

So what is it?

Academics have struggled with the label. Rustamjon Urinboyev and Sherzod Eraliev, writing in Central Asian Survey in 2022, call mahallas "hybrid institutions": partly acting for the state, partly an informal welfare network run by neighbours for neighbours. That seems right to us, and it explains why both the warm and the grim accounts of the mahalla are accurate at once.

The legal trend is one-directional, though. Every reform since 1993 has added staff, duties or reporting lines. None has taken them away.

For a visitor, the practical upshot is small. The MFY office is where locals go for certificates and help, not a place you need to register with; hotels and guesthouses handle tourist registration. If you're invited to a family celebration, though, the neighbourhood behind it is this same institution, which is worth knowing when you read about how Uzbek weddings work.

Sources

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