In a February 2020 report, the Eurasian Coalition on Health, Rights, Gender and Sexual Diversity (ECOM), an alliance of nongovernmental organizations working on LGBT issues, citing local activists, documented that police in Uzbekistan harassed gay men, detaining and interrogating several of them between August 15 and September 15, 2019. One activist said that LGBT crime survivors do not seek protection from police “fearing they will be outed, subjected to bullying and insults by the authorities. Gay men who face human rights abuses have few legal remedies. Uzbekistan is considering a new Criminal Code, yet the draft published on February 22, 2021, retains the offense, in a new article, 154, with the wording unchanged. While it seems that prosecutions based on article 120 are rare, police in Uzbekistan continue to use it to arbitrarily detain and threaten people, who may ultimately be prosecuted on other charges, such as prostitution. Turkmenistan has said that it will reconsider its law.
Only two states in the former Soviet Union, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, still criminalize consensual same-sex conduct. The men interviewed, who asked to remain anonymous, said that they faced arbitrary arrests, threats, extortion, psychological pressure, and physical attacks by both police and non-state actors for being gay.Īrticle 120 is a carry-over from Uzbekistan’s Soviet past and is problematic because it violates fundamental rights protected under international law, such as to privacy and bodily autonomy, and is blatantly discriminatory. Human Rights Watch interviewed nine gay men and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) activists and reviewed other material, such as videos depicting and encouraging humiliation, insults, beatings, or sexual abuse of gay men that were posted online and in homophobic social media groups, such as TashGangs. “Uzbekistan should definitively turn a page from its abusive past and remove this rights-violating and outdated provision from its new Criminal Code.” “Article 120, and abuses linked to it, has placed gay and bisexual men in Uzbekistan in a deeply vulnerable and marginalized position, leaving them with almost no protection from harassment by police and others,” said Hugh Williamson, director of the Europe and Central Asia division at Human Rights Watch. © 2013 Mel Longhurst/VWPics via AP Images When using a search engine such as Google, Bing or Yahoo check the safe search settings where you can exclude adult content sites from your search results Īsk your internet service provider if they offer additional filters īe responsible, know what your children are doing online.The Senate of the Republic of Uzbekistan, Independence Square, Mustakillik Maydoni, Tashkent, Uzbekistan. Use family filters of your operating systems and/or browsers Other steps you can take to protect your children are: More information about the RTA Label and compatible services can be found here. Parental tools that are compatible with the RTA label will block access to this site. We use the "Restricted To Adults" (RTA) website label to better enable parental filtering.
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