Shavkat Mirziyoyev. Photo by the Press Office of the President of Uzbekistan
Uzbek president Shavkat Mirziyoyev has issued a decree to set up a Republican Council to Work on International Ratings and Indexes, which is to focus on raising the country’s position in key international ratings and increase its attractiveness for investors.
The council is to conduct system analyses of Uzbekistan’s level of socio-economic and political-legal development, taking into account reforms carried out in various spheres to improve the country’s performance in international rankings. It is tasked with removing obstacles which hinder the reform process and analysing laws and measures that could influence the country’s position in these ratings.
The presidential press office pointed out that over the last four years, Uzbekistan has risen 52 places on the Heritage Foundation’s Economic Freedom Index, 19 places on the Logistics Performance Index and 18 places on the World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business Index, and has moved from the sixth to the fifth group of countries in the OECD’s Country Risk Classification. It will be remembered that Mirziyoyev last year set the target of moving an ambitious 56 places higher on the Doing Business Index by 2022, from Uzbekistan’s current position of 76 to place 20.
The creation of the council follows a new raft of enacted or planned reforms over the past two weeks.
On 22 May, a draft law was published outlining a number of changes to the electoral system, including allowing private companies and organisations to fund political parties’ and parliamentary candidates’ election campaigns. According to the proposals, however, such companies and organisations must not be foreign, and their financial assistance may not exceed funding provided to political parties by the state (in the last elections this was a little over $1,000 per candidate). Candidates will also have to open treasury accounts.
Further electoral changes aimed at democratisation are that parliamentary candidates will only be allowed to compete for seats in one representative organ – either parliament or local kengashes (councils). Parties with nine or more seats in parliament will not need to gather signatures in order to compete in elections. Individuals declared by the courts to lack legal capacity will be allowed to vote, and Uzbeks living abroad will be able to add themselves to the electoral list online and vote early from their place of residence. The draft law also mentions that it will be necessary to take steps to decriminalise slander and insult.
On 26 May, the Uzbek government decided to declassify information about the penal system, including the total number of prisoners and the number of deaths in the country’s prisons. Information about the number and location of prison facilities will also be made available, along with information about prisoners undergoing forced treatment, and any manufacturing activity undertaken by prisoners and the types and prices of the goods they produce.
This move follows a number of other steps undertaken by Shavkat Mirziyoyev since his assumption of office to liberalise the judicial system and ensure more transparent government. The acquittal rate in the country has grown and the number of criminal cases and prisoners decreased.
On 29 May, the state prosecutor’s office announced the creation of an independent committee to prevent torture in detention facilities. Committee members are to regularly visit prison facilities and meet unhindered with convicts and will be able to call on the help of specialists for medical and psychological evaluation. A call centre will be set up under the committee, which prisoners and those in detention can call 24-hours a day, including by video call. A new draft law is to be drawn up to inscribe norms for criminal responsibility for torture into Uzbek legislation which comply with the demands of the UN Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment. This is expected to improve Uzbekistan’s position in international ratings.
This is not the first change in recent years aimed at transforming the image of Uzbekistan as a police state. In 2018, punishments for applying torture were sharpened and criminal responsibility for assisting torture introduced. Human rights defenders stress, however, that ill treatment in detention facilities remains widespread and that greater checks on the part of civil society and open court proceedings in torture cases are necessary.
Also on 29 May, Uzbekistan’s first deputy minister for employment and labour relations, Erkin Mukhitdinov, recognised the importance of civil society monitoring in other major area which has long sullied Uzbekistan’s international image: forced labour. International experts who participated in the labour ministry’s online conference on the cotton industry stressed that the government needs to simplify the registration process of independent NGOs in order to gain the lifting of the current boycott on Uzbek cotton.
The same day, Mirziyoyev threatened to fire the heads of enterprises currently enjoying a position of monopoly in the country if they do not adapt to the demands of a competitive environment. 245 enterprises in Uzbekistan currently have monopoly status, producing 31 classes of goods and 82 kinds of service. 70 of these companies, however, already have competition in 19 kinds of goods and services and can thus be removed from the register of monopolies. The president has ordered the creation of a system to promote competition and the drawing up of a roadmap to sharply reduce the list of monopoly goods.
In contrast to the fears of some experts, coronavirus crisis does not seem to be holding back the rolling out of reforms in Uzbekistan. In fact, Uzbek justice minister Ruslanbek Davletov recently said that COVID-19 has helped the country in the fight against bureaucracy and outdated forms of government as new problems have highlighted systemic weaknesses and forced swift changes. Among other things, Davletov pointed to a draft law halving the number of licences demanded from Uzbek businesses. The transfer of government services online has also been accelerated by the crisis.
While Mirziyoyev’s much-praised liberalisation campaign continues, it should not be assumed that their necessary end is democratic politics or free market capitalism as practiced in the West, as a recent article in The Diplomat by Bekzod Zakirov has stressed. As Zakirov notes, reforms are focused primarily on the economic sphere and attracting foreign investment (including by improving Uzbekistan’s international image) and he argues that this is above all a method for the elite to preserve their control and increase their wealth by amended means. Rather than “democracy” then, the goal of the reforms is “market authoritarianism” and the model for them not the West but China, Russia, and, closer to home, Uzbekistan’s relatively successful neighbour Kazakhstan.
