Insulting the President Online: Article 158, Part 3
Since March 2021, insulting Uzbekistan's president online can mean up to five years in prison. What Article 158(3) says, who's been jailed, and 2025 cases.
In October 2023 a court in Kattakurgan sentenced Dilshod Iskandarov, 19, to two and a half years in prison for one Instagram comment. He'd written it while working as a migrant in Russia, under a video about the president's family, and he'd already deleted it himself.
The charge was Article 158, Part 3 of Uzbekistan's Criminal Code: publicly insulting or slandering the president, including online. The online wording is only five years old. It has already produced dozens of prosecutions, according to Human Rights Watch and The Diplomat, and the cases kept coming through 2025.
What the law says
Article 158 sits in the chapter on crimes against the Republic of Uzbekistan, under the heading "encroachment on the President". Before 2021, Part 3 covered public insult or slander of the president through the press or other mass media, and, as The Diplomat reported, a case needed a written complaint from the president or his representative.
Amendments signed in March 2021 changed two things. They added telecommunications networks and the internet to the list of ways the offence can be committed, so a blog post, a social-media comment, a photo, a voice note or a video now counts. And they removed the need for a complaint, so prosecutors can act on their own.
The penalty didn't change. It's one of three:
- corrective labour for up to 3 years;
- restriction of liberty for 2 to 5 years;
- imprisonment for up to 5 years.
For anyone else, insult and slander are usually dealt with first under the Administrative Code, with fines, and reach the Criminal Code's general articles only in aggravating circumstances, as officials describe it. For the president there's no administrative step. Nadezhda Ataeva of the Association for Human Rights in Central Asia put it this way to RFE/RL: in Uzbekistan "there is no warning, just a prison sentence."
Timing: a pledge, then the opposite
In 2020 President Shavkat Mirziyoyev promised to decriminalise defamation, and the OSCE's media freedom representative praised the move. A year later, the law went the other way where the president himself was concerned.
The online amendment came in a wider March 2021 package. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, the same package set up to 10 years in prison for online calls to "mass disturbances" under Article 244, and changed the 2003 Law on Information to ban online content "demonstrating disrespect to society, the state, and state symbols" and calls to join unsanctioned rallies. Site and account owners were given 24 hours to remove offending comments. It all landed about seven months before the presidential election of 24 October 2021.
Human Rights Watch had warned in early March 2021 that laws penalising criticism of public figures are contrary to international law, and that finding some speech insulting isn't enough to justify punishing it.
The government's case
Officials have defended the rule on constitutional grounds. When rights groups and internet users criticised the amendments, Bobur Bekmurodov, a member of the Legislative Chamber and chairman of the Yuksalish movement, wrote on Telegram that Uzbekistan is a presidential republic, that the authority of the presidency is tied to the authority of the state and the people, and that "the personality of the President is inviolable." He added that insulting anyone brings administrative liability, and criminal liability applies only in aggravating circumstances.
The Diplomat's reply was that in practice the aggravating circumstance seems to be simply whose name is in the post.
Who has been charged
The first known case under the new wording, as HRW describes it, was Valijon Kalonov, a blogger in his fifties from Jizzakh. Before the 2021 election he criticised the government, called for a boycott of the vote and spoke about China's treatment of Uyghurs. He was arrested in August 2021 on charges including insulting the president online. In December 2021 a court ruled that he couldn't be held criminally liable and ordered compulsory psychiatric treatment instead, on the basis of a state diagnosis. On 28 February 2025 the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention found his detention arbitrary and called for his release. HRW's World Report 2026 says he remained in forced psychiatric detention.
After Kalonov, most defendants weren't well-known bloggers. They were ordinary users, many of them young. Reported cases include:
| Person (age) | Platform | Sentence | When |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sobirjon Babaniyazov (31) | Telegram videos and audio | 3 years | Feb 2022 |
| Otkirbek Sobirov (27) | Telegram voice note about gas and power cuts | 2 years 3 months (HRW) to 3 years (The Diplomat) | 2023 |
| Dilshod Iskandarov (19) | Instagram comment | 2 years 6 months | Oct 2023 |
| Bunyodjon Boboniyazov (39) | Facebook posts | 5 years 1 month, together with Article 159 | Oct 2023 |
| D. Tursunov (27) | Facebook post | 5 years, together with illegal border crossing | 2024 |
| Sitora Bazarova (24) | Facebook posts | 5 years (RFE/RL) to 5 years 2 months (HRW) | early 2024 |
| Sobir Normamatov (28) | 2 years 6 months' corrective labour | Apr 2024 | |
| Davran Mamirjanov (34) | YouTube video and files shared privately | 3 years 6 months | Nov 2025 |
Where two figures appear, the reports disagree, and we've left both.
A few details stand out. Sobirov's voice note was mainly a complaint about the energy crisis of winter 2022–23, with a call for a rally. Tursunov had posted from Iran, about the president attending the Victory Day parade in Moscow, under the name "Muhammad Sanjar". The Diplomat reported that a Jizzakh court gave a 29-year-old four years in January 2024 for a TikTok comment left in June 2020, before the online wording existed. The same outlet cited UzNews on a Fergana man who received seven years in February 2024, a term above Part 3's maximum that suggests other charges were added.
How many cases are there in total? Nobody publishes a figure. RFE/RL counted at least 10 people sentenced under the article in the 12 months to May 2024. That's an undercount by design: it only includes cases that reached the press.
2025 and 2026: still in use
Davran Mamirjanov is the clearest recent example. According to the Uzbek Forum for Human Rights, which published the details in April 2026, the 34-year-old father of four ran a YouTube channel called "Xalq Gapirsin" ("Let the People Speak") with about 93,000 subscribers. He was arrested on 2 October 2025, and on 20 November the Kuyichirchik District Criminal Court in Tashkent region sentenced him to three and a half years. The court cited one of his videos, plus audio, photo and video files, some from exile media, that he'd sent privately to a friend on Telegram.
That last point is new territory. A private message isn't public by any ordinary reading, and "public" is in the article's own text.
HRW's World Report 2026 says the authorities kept imprisoning people for "insulting the president online" through 2025, and that in Karakalpakstan it was combined with a "separatism" charge against at least one person over Telegram posts. Freedom House, for context, reports that more than 30,000 people were prosecuted for defamation and insult under the Administrative Code in the first ten months of 2024, several over online speech.
How people get found
Nobody official has said. Iskandarov commented from an account with an obscure handle; Boboniyazov and Tursunov used other names on Facebook. The Diplomat's guess is that police trace the phone numbers attached to accounts; Uzbek SIM cards are sold against a passport. Plausible, but still a guess.
Does this apply to visitors?
The text doesn't limit it to citizens. Every reported case we found involves Uzbek citizens, several of whom posted from abroad and were prosecuted after coming home. For a visitor, the practical line is simple enough: criticise what you like at home, and don't post insults about the president while you're in the country. The rules tourists more often meet are in our laws and customs overview, and the piece on why TikTok is still blocked explains the separate question of which apps work there.
Sources
- The Diplomat: Uzbekistan criminalizes online slander against the president (April 2021)
- Committee to Protect Journalists: New Uzbekistan laws ban using internet to "disrespect" the government, organize protests (April 2021)
- RFE/RL: Jailed for insulting the Uzbek president (12 May 2024)
- The Diplomat: 1 amendment, dozens of arrests (May 2024)
- Human Rights Watch: Uzbekistan, imprisoned for "insulting the president online" (30 May 2024)
- Human Rights Watch: Free blogger from forced psychiatric detention (31 March 2025)
- Freedom House: Freedom on the Net 2025, Uzbekistan
- Human Rights Watch: World Report 2026, Uzbekistan
- Uzbek Forum for Human Rights: Blogger jailed for "insulting the president online" (17 April 2026)
This article is for general information and is not legal advice.