Why Uzbekistan Waited Until 2008 to End the Death Penalty

On 1 August 2005, President Islam Karimov signed a decree abolishing the death penalty in Uzbekistan. It didn't take effect for another two years and five months. For that whole stretch, courts could still hand down death sentences, and nothing in the decree stopped them being carried out.

The government's explanation was practical: the country needed somewhere to put the people who would now serve life instead. Rights groups called that a reason to build prisons, not a reason to keep executing. Both sides were talking about the same 29 months.

A list that had been shrinking for years

The 2005 decree didn't come out of nowhere, and its own preamble says so. At independence in 1991, Uzbekistan's inherited Soviet-era criminal law carried the death penalty in more than 30 articles. The new Criminal Code of 1994 cut that to 13. By 1998 it was eight, by 2001 four, and by 2003 just two: aggravated premeditated murder and terrorism.

So by the time Karimov signed decree UP-3641, the question wasn't really whether capital punishment would go. It was when, and on what terms.

The decree set the date at 1 January 2008 and said death sentences would be replaced by life imprisonment or long fixed terms. It gave the Ministry of Justice, the Supreme Court, the Prosecutor General's Office, the Interior Ministry and the National Security Service until 1 January 2006 to draft the changes to the Criminal Code, the Criminal Procedure Code and the Penal Enforcement Code. It told the Cabinet of Ministers to work out, within two months, how to build and staff a complex of facilities for prisoners serving very long sentences, and how to pay for it. There was even a clause asking state media to explain the change to the public.

The prison argument

The official case for the delay rested on that construction clause. A life sentence is a logistics commitment: a secure place, trained staff, and a budget that runs for decades. Uzbekistan had never had a life sentence before, so it had no prisons built for one.

That explains the date. It doesn't explain why executions weren't paused in the meantime.

Why not stop executions in 2005 and build the prisons while the condemned sat on death row? That's exactly what Amnesty International asked. Days after the decree, Amnesty called on Karimov to impose an immediate moratorium and to publish the names of those sentenced to death and awaiting execution, and it later titled a briefing on the subject "Questions of Life and Death Cannot Wait Until 2008". No moratorium came. Amnesty's position at the time was that executions would carry on until the new law took over.

How many? Nobody outside the government knew for certain. When the decree was announced, RFE/RL reported Karimov's own claim that executions had fallen below 60 a year, while international rights groups put the real figure at roughly twice that. Neither number could be checked independently, and that gap is part of the story.

"Torture and Secrecy"

That was the title FIDH, the International Federation for Human Rights, gave its October 2005 report on the death penalty in Uzbekistan. FIDH said the rights of people under arrest were "systematically violated", that suspects often had no lawyer during pre-trial detention, and that torture was used to extract confessions. It also said every official meeting it had requested during the mission was refused.

Amnesty raised a narrower, and grimmer, point. It said relatives of executed prisoners were not told the dates of execution or where the bodies were buried. When abolition finally arrived, Amnesty's welcome came with a request attached: publish information on how the death penalty had been used, give families full access to it, and let them collect the personal belongings of those executed.

The government's line throughout was that abolition was a considered, staged reform, and the shrinking list of capital crimes in the decree's own preamble was its evidence. Both things can be true at once. The direction was genuine; the process was opaque.

The law that did the actual work

A decree sets policy. The Criminal Code still had to be rewritten. That happened in mid-2007 with law ZRU-99, passed by the Legislative Chamber on 15 June, approved by the Senate on 29 June and signed on 11 July 2007. It rewrote the two remaining capital articles, Article 97 part 2 (aggravated murder) and Article 155 part 3 (terrorism). Where the penalty had read "twenty years or death", it now read twenty-five years or life imprisonment. The law came into force on 1 January 2008, matching the decree.

Date	Step
1991	More than 30 capital articles inherited at independence
1994	New Criminal Code: 13 capital articles
2003	Down to two: aggravated murder and terrorism
1 Aug 2005	Decree UP-3641 sets abolition for 1 January 2008
11 Jul 2007	Law ZRU-99 replaces death with life or 25 years
1 Jan 2008	Abolition in force; habeas corpus introduced
23 Dec 2008	Accession to the UN protocol on abolition
30 Apr 2023	New constitution approved by referendum, with a ban in Article 25

1 January 2008, and what came with it

Amnesty counted Uzbekistan as the 135th country in the world to abolish the death penalty in law or practice. The same day, Uzbekistan introduced habeas corpus: from then on a court, not a prosecutor, had to sanction someone's arrest and pre-trial detention.

On paper that was the bigger change for most people, because far more Uzbeks faced arrest than ever faced a death sentence. In practice it was slower to bite. Human Rights Watch reported in 2011 that, four years on, habeas corpus existed "largely on paper", and quoted a lawyer who said that all it had really done was put the court in the prosecutor's place. The government presented it as a milestone in judicial reform. The two assessments sat side by side for years. The next big test of that reform is the jury pilot for especially serious crimes, due in Tashkent courts from November 2026.

Abolition itself held. In December 2008 the Senate approved Uzbekistan's accession to the Second Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the UN treaty aimed at abolishing the death penalty; Karimov signed it on 12 December and accession was completed on 23 December. The World Coalition Against the Death Penalty counted Uzbekistan as the protocol's 70th state party. That matters more than it sounds. The protocol has no exit clause, so a state that joins it has committed to not bringing executions back.

Written into the constitution in 2023

For fifteen years the ban lived in ordinary legislation and a treaty. The new constitution approved in the referendum of 30 April 2023 lifted it a level higher. Article 25 describes the right to life as inalienable and states plainly that capital punishment is prohibited in the Republic of Uzbekistan.

It wasn't a foregone conclusion. According to The Diplomat, some proposals to bring the death penalty back were raised during the 2022 constitutional drafting, and they didn't make it into the final text.

The debate still returns whenever a crime against a child shocks the country. In 2024 a deputy speaker of the lower house wrote on social media that people who commit such crimes "should not live", and in late 2025 calls for reinstatement and for chemical castration of repeat offenders surfaced again, as The Diplomat reported. A Tashkent law professor it interviewed called reinstatement unrealistic, given the 2008 protocol. We'd agree with her: between the treaty and Article 25, bringing executions back would mean rewriting the constitution and breaking an international commitment, not just amending a code.

Why the delay still matters

Twenty-nine months is a short gap in a country's legal history. It's a long time on death row. The honest summary of 2005 to 2008 is that Uzbekistan made a real decision and then attached a slow timetable and very little transparency to it, and the families who were never told where their relatives were buried are the people that timetable cost most.

For a visitor, none of this changes anything practical; for the rules you'll actually meet, see Uzbek laws and customs. If you want to see how punishment looked before any codes at all, Bukhara's Zindan, the old emirate prison, is now a small museum a few minutes' walk from the Ark.

Sources

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