Law concerning the protection of women in Uzbekistan is inactive for four months

Not a single security order has been issued since September 2, when the President Mirziyoev signed the law on protecting women from oppression and violence. One of the protection instruments specified in the law is a security order. Such warrants are issued to prevent recurrence of violence and neutralize aggressors.

A security order must be issued by employees of the internal affairs structures. Nobody in the law enforcement system knows the procedure for issuing the security order and in what form to write it out.

According to the article 23 of the law “The form of a security order and the procedure for its submission is approved by the Cabinet of Ministers of the Republic of Uzbekistan”. However, according to ACCA, this has not yet been done. The article 34 “Bringing legislation into line with this law”, which requires the revision and repeal of normative legal acts contrary to the law by government bodies, is also inactive.

After the adoption of the law, a network of Social adaptation centers was created in the country, and a telephone helpline was organized. As planned, all this is intended to help women and girls who are victims of violence to receive psychological, legal or medical assistance.

The taken measures were not effective enough. This was indirectly confirmed by the former Deputy Prime Minister and the head of the Republican Women’s Committee, Tanzila Narbaeva, who in June 2019 was elected chairman of the Senate of the country’s Parliament. She stated that “violence against women is a serious human rights violation. Women in our country, as a rule, are afraid or embarrassed to talk about what is happening even to close relatives”.

In most cases, violence is taken place in the family. Often women, who are divorced from their husbands, are hindered by public organizations, women’s committees of various levels, and citizens’ self-government. The President supports them in this, reproaching that all sorts of commissions have not taken any measures to reduce the number of divorces.

One of the feminist groups in Uzbekistan is demanding to stop a pressure from government agencies. “Why are the mahalla committees still trying to make the divorce procedure as difficult as possible?” Do you know that there are cases when husbands crippled and even killed their wives in the process of a protracted divorce? And this could not have happened if the divorce procedure had been carried out in an adequate period of time,” the statement says.

Meanwhile, according to the Women’s Committee in Uzbekistan, more than 600 women commit suicide every year.