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Uzbek authorities have boasted of opening up, of great reforms in progress, since 2016. But for many independent Uzbek NGOs, the barriers to registration remain high and almost unscalable, as Dilmurad Yusupov, a Ph.D. researcher at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) at the University of Sussex, explains in the interview below with The Diplomat’s Catherine Putz. Tashkent has bragged of 10,000 NGOs in the country, but Yusupov says the official statistic is inflated by government-organized NGOs (GONGOs) which are backed by considerable institutional support and lack the grassroot connections of genuine NGOs.
Yusupov, an advocate for disability inclusion and civil society development in Uzbekistan, stresses that truly independent NGOs are critical to Uzbekistan’s democratic development.
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Interviews took place in November 2020 and were conducted remotely in Russian.
Chiroq (“Light”)
Azimbay Ataniyazov, head of Chiroq, tried twice unsuccessfully to register the group with the Justice Ministry of Karakalpakstan, an autonomous region in the north of Uzbekistan, once in January and again in March 2020. The group focuses on forced labor and human rights violations in the region. Ataniyazov is planning to apply a third time.
His first application was rejected “because of grammatical mistakes in the submitted documents.” The second time, the Justice Ministry replied that he had to correct the mistakes and submit all the required documents and signatures of the founding members again, as the Ministry had not returned the initial submission. In rejecting the second application, the Ministry said that Ataniyazov should provide 12 founding members’ signatures, although the law requires 10, which Ataniyazov had provided.