Saida Mirziyoyeva has called for the return of the death penalty amid an investigation into the sexual abuse of a five-year-old child at a state kindergarten in Uchkurgan district, Namangan region. The death penalty was abolished in Uzbekistan in 2008 following a years-long campaign by human rights activists.
“I was briefed on the tragedy that occurred in Namangan. When I learned about it, I felt genuine anger,” wrote the head of the Presidential Administration and eldest daughter of Shavkat Mirziyoyev on her Telegram channel on September 27.
According to Mirziyoyeva, the death penalty “should be applied for such heinous crimes”.
“Since the current law does not provide for it, we are preparing proposals to amend the legislation in order to make the punishment as severe as possible,” she said.
Mirziyoyeva also said she had issued the necessary instructions to the relevant authorities.
“The perpetrator will face the harshest possible punishment. As will all those who allowed this to happen, showed negligence and failed to protect the child,” she wrote.
The statement came amid a criminal investigation into the sexual abuse of a five-year-old child at a kindergarten in Uchkurgan district.
According to an official statement by the Prosecutor General’s Office, a criminal case was opened under Article 118 (“Rape”) and Article 112 (“Threat of murder or violence”) of Uzbekistan’s Criminal Code. The maximum sentence under Article 118 is up to 20 years in prison, while Article 112 carries a maximum sentence of up to three years in prison.
According to the prosecutor’s office, one person has been placed in pre-trial detention. The investigation has been transferred to the Namangan Regional Prosecutor’s Office and is under the personal supervision of the Prosecutor General.
The supervisory authority said the rights of the minor victim would be protected and that any identified cases involving the possible concealment of circumstances surrounding the crime or inaction by officials would be given a legal assessment.
According to Children’s Ombudswoman Surayyo Rakhmonova, the criminal case was opened on September 12. The suspect was detained the same day, and a court ordered him held in custody.
On September 22, the ombudswoman submitted a formal representation to the Ministry of Preschool and School Education, demanding that the results of an internal investigation be reviewed.
The representation raised the question of why the incident had been possible and called for the causes and conditions that may have contributed to it to be eliminated, oversight of preschool staff to be strengthened, and child-safety mechanisms to be reviewed.
It was also reported that claims had circulated on social media that the child had allegedly been left unsupervised at the time of the incident and that the family may have faced pressure afterward. This information has not been officially confirmed.
The death penalty was abolished in Uzbekistan in 2008
Saida Mirziyoyeva’s statement was one of the most prominent public statements by a government official on the death penalty in recent years.
The death penalty was finally abolished in Uzbekistan effective January 1, 2008. Before that, the republic was one of the few post-Soviet countries where death sentences continued to be carried out.
One of the country’s best-known opponents of capital punishment was human rights activist Tamara Chikunova.
In April 1999, her son Dmitry Chikunov was detained in Tashkent on charges of double murder. Chikunova said that his confession had been obtained under torture. He was later sentenced to death and executed by shooting in 2000. Dmitry himself maintained his innocence to the end.
His family was not told where he was buried. At the time, Uzbek law did not provide for such information to be disclosed to the families of executed prisoners. On the day Chikunova was informed of her son’s execution, she agreed to give me an interview.
After her son’s death, Tamara Chikunova became one of the country’s best-known human rights activists. Her organization, “Mothers Against the Death Penalty and Torture,” was never registered by the authorities, while Chikunova herself received international recognition.
For several years, relatives of people sentenced to death held press conferences, sought meetings with representatives of international organizations and publicly raised concerns about possible miscarriages of justice in cases where irreversible sentences had already been handed down. I also took part in such conferences, met with relatives of those sentenced to death, read Dmitry Chikunov’s letters describing torture, and saw photographs of other prisoners, including those who died after being tortured.
The risk of executing an innocent person was one of the main arguments made by opponents of the death penalty in Uzbekistan. They pointed out that once an execution had been carried out, a judicial error could no longer be corrected.
The exact number of people executed in Uzbekistan before the abolition of the death penalty was never officially disclosed, with one exception. In 2001, then-President Islam Karimov, answering my question, said that approximately 100 or more death sentences were carried out each year.
The abolition of the death penalty was one of the most significant legal reforms of the final years of Karimov’s rule.
The decision was made by presidential decree in 2005 and took effect on January 1, 2008. Life imprisonment and lengthy prison terms were introduced in place of the death penalty.
The decision came amid years of criticism from international human rights organizations, which pointed to the secrecy surrounding the execution of death sentences, the lack of information about the burial places of those executed, and reports of torture during investigations.
The death penalty is currently not provided for under any article of Uzbekistan’s Criminal Code. It remains unclear exactly how the proposals announced by Saida Mirziyoyeva could be implemented.
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