Uzbekistan's politics: a sovereign republic inside a presidential state

How the current constitution was adopted

Uzbekistan's first constitution as an independent state was adopted on 8 December 1992 and replaced the Soviet text of 1978. The second began as a proposal by deputies in May 2022. A Constitutional Commission of 47 members was formed by both chambers of parliament on 20 May 2022 and, according to the authorities, collected about 60,000 proposals before publishing a draft and some 150,000 from citizens after it. The Legislative Chamber approved the draft on 10 March 2023 and set the referendum for 30 April; the Constitutional Court confirmed the procedure on 13 March and the Senate the decision on 14 March.

The OSCE's Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights sent a limited observation mission. Its final report counted 19,722,809 registered voters, a turnout of 85.51% and 90.21% of votes in favour. It found the referendum "technically well-prepared", noted that amendments affecting about two thirds of the constitution were put to voters as a single package, and concluded that it "took place in an environment short of genuine political pluralism and competition". No registered party or civil society organisation opposed the amendments.

The new text describes Uzbekistan in its first article as a "sovereign, democratic, rule-of-law, social, and secular state". It prohibits the death penalty, adds a right to housing and keeps Uzbek as the state language. Among the changes ODIHR found had gone without open debate was the presidency: the term went from five years to seven, and the count of terms was reset for the incumbent.

What the president is allowed to do

The president is head of state and is elected directly for seven years. A candidate must be at least 35, speak the state language well and have lived in the country for the previous ten years, and no one may serve more than two consecutive terms. Article 128 sets ordinary elections on the first Sunday of the third ten-day period of October, but the president may call an early presidential election, and one was held on 9 July 2023, ten weeks after the referendum.

The constitution puts the cabinet under the president's direction. The president proposes the prime minister after consulting the party factions, and the Legislative Chamber approves the candidate by a majority of all its deputies; if it rejects three candidates, the president appoints a prime minister and may dissolve the chamber. The president also nominates the members of the Constitutional Court, the Supreme Court and the Supreme Judicial Council for election by the Senate, appoints the governors of the regions and of Tashkent city, and may dissolve both chambers after consulting the Constitutional Court where they deadlock or repeatedly act against the constitution.

ODIHR describes the system as a presidential republic in which the president issues binding decrees and resolutions and has a key role in appointing the prosecutor general and the head of the State Security Service. Freedom House, in its report for 2025, writes that the legislature and the judiciary "effectively serve as instruments of the executive branch, which initiates reforms by decree".

The courts are headed by the Constitutional Court and the Supreme Court; Britannica also lists a Higher Economic Court for commercial cases and two high courts for Karakalpakstan. The constitution declares the judiciary independent of the other branches and of political parties, forbids judges to belong to a party or take paid work outside science, teaching and creative activity, and has the Senate elect the members of the two highest courts and of the Supreme Judicial Council from candidates the president submits. The prosecutor's office, a Soviet inheritance, both prosecutes and investigates criminal cases, an arrangement the Wikipedia article on the country's politics says limits the pretrial rights of defendants.

Who sits in the Oliy Majlis

Parliament, the Oliy Majlis, has two chambers, each elected for five years. The Legislative Chamber has 150 deputies. Since the reforms of 2023 half are elected from national party lists and half in single-member districts, and party lists must include at least 40% women. The Senate is a chamber of the territories: four senators are chosen from each of Karakalpakstan, the twelve regions and Tashkent city by their local councils, and nine are appointed by the president.

The arrangement is recent. The Oliy Majlis replaced the Supreme Soviet in 1994 and was a single chamber until a referendum of 2002 approved a second one. In the first post-Soviet parliament, elected in December 1994 and January 1995, only two parties were allowed to stand.

The election of 27 October 2024 returned five parties, all registered and all supportive of the government's programme in the account of Freedom House:

Women won 38% of the seats in the Legislative Chamber in 2024 and held about 24% in the Senate, which was chosen in November. Observers from the OSCE recorded numerous violations again, and found that registering an opposition party or an independent candidate remained effectively impossible.

Why no opposition party is registered

The People's Democratic Party is the old Communist Party of Uzbekistan, which cut its ties with the Soviet party in 1991 and changed its name three months after independence. Birlik, the opposition movement formed by intellectuals in 1989, was refused registration before the presidential election of December 1991, in which Islam Karimov took 86% against Muhammad Salih, and it was banned in 1992. Six dissidents were sentenced in April 1995 for distributing the newspaper of another party, Erk.

The rules have barely moved since. A party needs 20,000 signatures collected in at least eight regions under the Law on Political Parties of 1996, and ODIHR reported in 2023 that apart from the Ecological Party, registered in 2019, no party had been granted registration since 2003. Two parties were refused in 2021 for failing the signature requirement. The Truth, Development and Unity Democratic Party, which opposed the government, held a founding meeting on 16 April 2023 and was refused on 16 June; the Ministry of Justice said it had received 10,777 signatures and recognised 1,439 of them as valid.

Freedom House rates the country Not Free in its 2025 report and notes some improvements since 2016, among them a meaningful reduction in small-scale corruption, alongside continuing reports of torture and convictions for insulting the president on social media. The constitution gives citizens the right to form and join political parties, and bans parties formed on national or religious grounds or seeking to change the constitutional order by force.

How Karakalpakstan fits inside the republic

Karakalpakstan joined the Uzbek Soviet republic in 1936 as an autonomous unit and kept that status at independence. The 2023 constitution gives it a chapter of its own. Article 85 calls it a sovereign republic forming part of Uzbekistan; Article 86 gives it its own constitution, which may not contradict Uzbekistan's; its territory and borders may not be changed without its consent; and Article 89 gives it the right to secede on the basis of a nationwide referendum of its people. Disputes between the two republics are to be settled by diplomatic means, and the head of Karakalpakstan's government sits in the national cabinet.

The first draft of the new constitution removed the sovereign status and the right to secede. When the change became public and a local activist who had called for a demonstration was detained on 1 July 2022, large protests broke out in Nukus. The state and the human rights organisations describe what followed in different terms. The Prosecutor General announced that 21 people were killed and 274 injured, and 22 people were charged with organising mass riots and conspiring to overthrow the constitutional order; on appeal on 5 June 2023 the lawyer Dauletmurat Tajimuratov's sixteen-year sentence was upheld.

Human Rights Watch, after verifying 55 videos, reported in November 2022 that security forces had used lethal force against mainly peaceful demonstrators on 1 and 2 July, including small arms and grenades, that at least 21 people died, four of them law enforcement officers, and that more than 270 were injured.

The proposals on Karakalpakstan were withdrawn after the president visited Nukus. Parliament set up a commission of inquiry under the human rights ombudswoman on 15 July 2022. In February 2024 the authorities banned Alga Karakalpakstan, an unregistered party that supports independence for the republic, as extremist. The census of January 2026 counted 2,149,932 people in Karakalpakstan, 772,340 of them Karakalpaks.

How the regions and the mahallas are run

Below the national level the country is divided into Karakalpakstan, twelve regions and the city of Tashkent, and further into districts. Each region, district and city has a Council of People's Deputies elected for five years and a khokim, the head of the local executive. The president appoints and dismisses the khokims of the regions and of Tashkent city; regional khokims appoint those of districts and cities, subject to the councils' approval. The 2023 text limits a khokim to two consecutive terms in the same place. ODIHR noted in 2023 that all the regional governors were men.

The smallest unit is the mahalla, the urban or village neighbourhood, whose citizens' assembly elects a chairperson. Article 127 declares these assemblies bodies of self-government outside the system of state power. In practice they carry public functions: ODIHR found mahalla committees acting at once as commissioners, observers and campaigners in the 2023 referendum, the United Nations University lists them among the institutions that mobilised pickers for the cotton harvest until 2017, and the National Statistics Committee thanked the "mahalla seven" for helping to run the 2026 census.

Who Uzbekistan stands with abroad

Uzbekistan joined the Commonwealth of Independent States at its founding in December 1991 and the United Nations on 2 March 1992. It has moved in and out of the security arrangements around it. It withdrew from the CIS collective security treaty in 1999, joined the GUAM group of Georgia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan and Moldova that year and left it in 2005, became a full participant in the Collective Security Treaty Organization in June 2006 and suspended its membership in June 2012.

Relations with the United States followed the same pattern. After September 2001 the government gave American forces the Karshi-Khanabad air base, and after Washington joined calls for an international inquiry into the Andijan killings of May 2005 it ordered them out within 180 days. Uzbekistan hosts the Regional Anti-Terrorist Structure of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation in Tashkent, joined the Organization of Turkic States in 2019 and has held observer status at the World Trade Organization since applying in December 1994.

Since 2016 the government has worked to settle its quarrels with its neighbours. Britannica records that an Uzbek delegation attended the inauguration of Tajikistan's Rogun dam in 2018, a project Karimov had threatened war over because of its effect on the rivers that feed Uzbekistan. The constitution commits foreign policy to the sovereign equality of states, non-interference and the peaceful settlement of disputes.