Article 126-1: Uzbekistan's Domestic Violence Law in Practice

Every second domestic violence case that reaches a criminal court in Uzbekistan ends without a verdict. That's the headline finding of a UNDP-backed review of 882 court documents from 2023 and 2024: 501 cases, or 56.8%, were closed because the victim and the accused "reconciled". Not one of the cases in the sample ended in an acquittal.

The law is being used. It's also being closed by reconciliation more often than it ends in a conviction.

From no offence to a standalone crime

Until 2023, Uzbekistan had no specific domestic violence offence. Abuse at home could be prosecuted only under general articles on bodily harm, beatings or threats, and a first assault was often just an administrative matter. A 2019 law on protecting women from harassment and violence and a January 2020 government resolution created protection orders, but not a crime with its own name.

Law No. ZRU-829, signed on 11 April 2023, changed that. It added Article 126-1, "Family (domestic) violence", to the Criminal Code and Article 59-2 to the Code of Administrative Responsibility. UNDP's report says the main purpose was to implement a recommendation from the UN committee that monitors the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW).

Amnesty International noted that this made Uzbekistan the fifth country in Eastern Europe and Central Asia to treat domestic violence as a separate offence, after Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova and Ukraine. The same law extended protection orders from 30 days, renewable once, to as long as a year.

What the article covers

Article 126-1 protects a spouse, a former spouse, a person sharing a household, and a person with whom the offender has a child. Children were added to parts 2 to 4 in October 2024 (more on that below). The article has eight parts, and the penalties climb steeply:

Part	Conduct (summarised)	Maximum penalty
1	Blocking access to property, education, health care or work; damaging belongings; humiliation, intimidation or isolation from relatives, if it harms health and follows an administrative penalty	20–30 BCV fine, community service or up to 2 years' correctional labour
2	Beatings or minor injury with no health impairment, after an administrative penalty	Same as part 1
3	Minor injury causing 6–21 days of health impairment	Up to 2 years' prison
4	Moderate injury (21 days to 4 months, or 10–33% permanent loss of capacity)	Up to 3 years' prison
5	Part 4 with aggravating factors, such as a pregnant victim, particular cruelty, a weapon or repeat offending	3–5 years' prison
6	Life-threatening or grave injury	5–7 years' prison
7	Part 6 with aggravating factors, including a minor or pregnant victim	7–10 years' prison
8	Part 6 against two or more people, repeated, or causing death	10–12 years' prison

So when you read that the law carries five to 12 years, as the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ) summarised it, that's the top end: parts 6 to 8, for grave physical harm. Some reports give "10 to 12 years", which is only part 8. Psychological and economic abuse sits in part 1 and is criminal only after an earlier administrative penalty.

Below the criminal threshold is Article 59-2 of the administrative code: a fine of 10 to 20 BCV or administrative arrest of up to 10 days for the non-physical forms, and up to 15 days for beatings or minor injury. At the base calculation value of 440,000 som in force since 1 September 2026, that fine is 4.4 million to 8.8 million som. Parts 1 and 2 of the criminal article carry 20 to 30 BCV, or 8.8 million to 13.2 million som.

The numbers since April 2023

Supreme Court figures, cited in an ICJ briefing paper and in a 2025 report by the International Partnership for Human Rights (IPHR), show that in the rest of 2023 after the law took effect, 203 people were convicted under Article 126-1. Of those, 59 went to prison and 144 received non-custodial sentences. Another 8,928 people were punished under the administrative article in the same period: 5,229 fined and 3,699 arrested.

The pattern held in 2024. For January to October, the Supreme Court's press secretary reported 15,826 people sentenced for domestic violence, according to Gazeta.uz. Of those, 15,427 were administrative cases (9,210 fines, 6,217 arrests) and 399 were criminal convictions: 126 prison terms, 255 non-custodial sentences and 18 suspended ones. Human Rights Watch put the figure at more than 10,000 people prosecuted in the first ten months of 2025.

Put simply, around 97 in every 100 people held responsible get a fine or a few days in a cell, not a criminal record. Is that a failure? Not necessarily. Most recorded incidents are at the lower end of the scale. The concern is what happens to the cases that don't stay there.

Reconciliation, and who has a lawyer

The UNDP review was carried out in 2024 with Uzbekistan's human rights ombudsman, the Ministry of Justice and the NGO MADAD, funded by Finland. As of January 2025, criminal courts had heard 1,454 domestic violence cases (459 in 2023, 995 in 2024). The sample of 882 documents turned up several uncomfortable details:

In 465 of the 501 cases closed by reconciliation, the victim had suffered some degree of health damage.
Victims had no lawyer in 96.1% of cases; the report puts it as one case in 25 where a victim was represented.
Male judges heard 97% of the cases.
Among those convicted, 130 got prison and 238 got non-custodial sentences, most often correctional labour or restriction of liberty.

The report's recommendations are practical: free state legal aid for victims, a Supreme Court plenum ruling specifically on domestic violence, and follow-up by mahalla women's activists in families that have "reconciled" after chronic abuse.

Reconciliation is where our sympathy with the critics is strongest. A victim who shares a home, children and an extended family with the accused isn't negotiating from an equal position. HRW's March 2026 dispatch made the same point, citing a 2024 study in which more than 55% of cases were dismissed through reconciliation and over 90% of victims had no legal representation.

What changed in 2024 and 2025

Parliament has kept adjusting the law. After the Senate approved amendments in September 2024, Law No. ZRU-978 was signed on 21 October 2024. It added children to the list of people protected under the physical-violence parts of Article 126-1 and under Article 59-2; before that, only spouses, former spouses, cohabitants and co-parents were listed.

The same package limited reconciliation to the court stage, so a case can no longer be closed that way during the investigation. Gazeta.uz linked the change to data showing 506 of 894 family violence cases between 2023 and May 2024 had ended in reconciliation. In February 2025, according to HRW, the mandatory reconciliation period in divorce cases involving domestic violence was also scrapped.

The government's next step, and HRW's view

On 3 March 2026, President Mirziyoyev signed a decree on protecting women and children from harassment and violence. As reported by Gazeta.uz, it plans criminal liability for femicide, stalking and cyberviolence, an SOS app from 1 April for women holding protection orders, a police target of arriving within 10 minutes inside a 5-kilometre radius, and free pre-marriage courses on preventing domestic violence.

A day later, HRW published its assessment under the title "Uzbekistan's Domestic Violence Reforms Fall Short". It acknowledges the 2023 law and the later changes, but argues that routine reconciliation, limited shelters and legal aid, stigma, and poorly trained officials mean most survivors don't yet get the protection the statute promises. The government's answer so far has been more legislation: the 2024 amendments and now the March 2026 decree.

Both things can be true. Three years is short for a new offence. And the data are still patchy: as of January 2025, the Supreme Court's published statistics had no separate line for Article 126-1, and the UNDP team had to piece its figures together from the court's online case portal.

For support inside Uzbekistan, UN Women lists the nationwide 1146 hotline, which offers psychological, legal and social help. For general context on the legal system as it affects visitors, see laws and customs in Uzbekistan; for how marriage itself is regulated, see our piece on polygamy law.

Sources

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