He Boiled Prisoners Alive and Called It a Kettle Accident — Then Ran for a Fourth Term the Constitution Said He Couldn't: Uzbekistan's Document of Convenient Fictions
Uzbekistan — Constitution Profile
| 📅 Original Constitution Adopted | December 8, 1992 |
| 🏛️ Government Type | Presidential Republic (Authoritarian in practice) |
| 🌍 Capital | Tashkent |
| 📜 Constitution Rewritten | 65% of text changed in April 2023 referendum |
| 🩸 Defining Atrocity | Andijan Massacre, May 13, 2005 — hundreds killed by government forces |
| 🔄 Constitutional Trick | 2023 referendum "zeroed" presidential terms — Mirziyoyev now eligible until 2040 |
When the British ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, began filing diplomatic cables to London in 2002 describing the systematic torture of prisoners — including accounts of people being boiled alive — the Uzbek government's official response was that one death had been an accident involving a kettle. Murray was eventually dismissed by the Foreign Office in 2004. The constitution of Uzbekistan, in force since December 8, 1992, guaranteed freedom from torture throughout all of this. It also guaranteed a two-term limit on the presidency. The man who ran the country while prisoners were boiled alive ran for a fourth consecutive term anyway. His name was Islam Karimov, and when he died in 2016 after 27 years in power, the constitution he had spent a generation bending to his will was still standing — ready to be bent again by whoever came next.
The Constitution That Was Named After Its First Abuser
Uzbekistan declared independence on August 31, 1991, following the failed Soviet coup in Moscow. One year later, on December 8, 1992, the Supreme Council adopted a new constitution to replace the Soviet-era document of 1977. The date — December 8 — is still observed as Constitution Day. Scholars and observers at the time informally called it "Karimov's Constitution," not because he alone wrote it, but because the document was designed around a strong presidency, and Karimov was the strong president it was designed for. The constitution created a two-chamber parliament (Oliy Majlis), an independent judiciary on paper, and a bill of rights that ran to several dozen articles. It also set a clear two-term limit for the presidency. Karimov served four terms.
The mechanism by which he did so was straightforward: he used referendums to extend his terms rather than reset them. In March 1995, a referendum extended his first term to the year 2000 without holding an election. Then on January 27, 2002, a second referendum changed the presidential term from five to seven years and extended his tenure accordingly to 2007. Each time, the formal legal procedure of a referendum provided the veneer of popular legitimacy. The constitution's two-term limit remained on paper throughout — Karimov simply extended each individual term so broadly that the limit never became an obstacle. His successor would eventually find an even neater solution: instead of extending terms, he would erase them entirely.
A Massacre the Constitution Couldn't Prevent — and the World Chose to Forget
On May 13, 2005, government security forces opened fire on a crowd of up to 10,000 protesters who had gathered in Bobur Square in Andijan, a city in the fertile Fergana Valley. The protesters had assembled after a group of local businessmen, accused of Islamic extremism, were broken out of prison by their supporters. Karimov's government immediately framed the entire event as an Islamist uprising. Human Rights Watch, which conducted extensive field research in the aftermath, found no evidence of an Islamist agenda and concluded that the vast majority of those killed were unarmed civilians. The official Uzbek death toll was 187. Independent estimates ranged from several hundred to over a thousand. Many of the dead were secretly buried in mass graves, making an accurate count impossible.
The constitutional guarantees that should have prevented the massacre — the right to life, the right to peaceful assembly, the prohibition against arbitrary killing by state forces — were present in the text throughout. What happened instead was that Karimov expelled American forces from the Karshi-Khanabad military base in retaliation for Western criticism, tilted toward Russia and China, and waited. Within four years, the United States and European Union — driven by Uzbekistan's strategic importance as a supply route for operations in Afghanistan — had quietly resumed close ties with the same government that had mowed down hundreds of its own citizens in a public square. The constitution's rights provisions had not changed. The geopolitical calculus had.
The Daughter Who Was Going to Inherit the Country — Until She Wasn't
For years, political observers in Tashkent and foreign capitals assumed that Karimov's eldest daughter, Gulnara Karimova, was being groomed as her father's successor. A diplomat's worst nightmare and a tabloid's dream, Gulnara was simultaneously a UN ambassador, a pop singer who performed under the name "GooGoosha," a fashion designer, a businesswoman, and — according to a WikiLeaks cable — "the single most hated person in Uzbekistan." She was also, according to international prosecutors in Sweden, France, and the United States, the recipient of hundreds of millions of dollars in bribes from telecommunications companies seeking access to the Uzbek market.
In January 2014, Karimov announced he was running for a fourth term himself. Within weeks, Gulnara's home was raided by security forces. She was placed under house arrest in Tashkent, where she is believed to have remained ever since, conspicuously absent from her own father's funeral in September 2016. The constitution's provisions for presidential succession pointed toward the Senate chairman in the event of the president's incapacitation — but those provisions were entirely unprepared for what actually happened when Karimov suffered a stroke on August 27, 2016, and died six days later. He had named no successor, the public wasn't told for days that he was even ill, and the actual transfer of power was negotiated behind closed doors by the security establishment. Prime Minister Shavkat Mirziyoyev was declared acting president. The constitution's succession provisions were, in practice, beside the point.
The "Uzbek Thaw" — Real Reforms, Still No Democracy
Mirziyoyev's early years in office produced changes that, by comparison with Karimov's rule, seemed dramatic. He released political prisoners. He abolished the forced labor system that had sent millions of Uzbeks — including children — into the cotton fields every harvest season. He opened the economy to foreign investment, liberalized the currency, and introduced visa-free travel for dozens of countries. He reduced the power of the feared SNB secret service, the successor to the Soviet KGB. International human rights organizations cautiously acknowledged that conditions had improved. The "Uzbek thaw" became a recognizable term in foreign policy circles. The constitution's rights guarantees, for the first time in decades, began to have some correspondence with lived reality for at least some Uzbek citizens.
What Mirziyoyev did not do was dismantle the constitutional architecture of presidential dominance that Karimov had built and that he now occupied. Opposition parties remained absent from parliament. Independent media remained tightly constrained. The judiciary remained subordinate to the executive in practice. When Mirziyoyev was re-elected in October 2021 with an official 80.1 percent of the vote — in an election noted by observers for its lack of genuine competition — the fundamental structure of power in Uzbekistan had changed in texture but not in kind. The thaw was real. So was the ceiling.
The Referendum That Erased the Clock — Not Just Extended It
By 2023, Mirziyoyev faced the same problem Karimov had faced twice before: the constitution said he couldn't run again. He had served two terms. But where Karimov had used referendums to stretch individual terms longer, Mirziyoyev's team found a cleaner solution. On April 30, 2023, Uzbekistan held a constitutional referendum officially framed as a wholesale modernization of the founding document — expanding rights protections, adding social guarantees, increasing the number of constitutional articles from 128 to 155, and rewriting 65 percent of the text. The referendum passed with 90.12 percent support and a turnout of 84.5 percent. The OSCE noted it was technically well-prepared but failed to ensure genuine democratic conditions.
Buried inside the reforms was the move that mattered most to the presidency. Uzbek officials confirmed that the adoption of a new constitutional text would "nullify" Mirziyoyev's previous terms entirely — not extend them, but erase them from the constitutional record as if they had never happened. His presidential clock was restarted from zero. The term length was simultaneously extended from five years to seven. Early presidential elections were called for July 2023, which he won with 87.05 percent of the vote. Mirziyoyev is now constitutionally eligible to serve two full seven-year terms from that point — potentially remaining in power until 2040. Among the genuine reforms the 2023 constitution introduced were buried the same constitutional mechanics Karimov had pioneered two decades earlier, now executed with greater legal elegance. The clock had not just been paused. It had been reset to zero.
The Republic Inside the Republic — With Its Own Constitutional Crisis
One provision of the 2023 constitutional process nearly derailed it entirely. Karakalpakstan, an autonomous republic within Uzbekistan's borders covering 37 percent of the country's territory along the dying Aral Sea, held the formal right to secession under Uzbekistan's existing constitutional framework. The 2023 draft proposed removing that right. On July 1, 2022, when a draft version of the changes leaked and spread on social media, Karakalpakstan erupted in protests — the most significant public unrest in Uzbekistan since Andijan. Security forces were deployed and used lethal force, including small arms and grenades, to disperse largely peaceful demonstrators. At least 21 people were killed according to official figures — including four law enforcement officers — with unofficial sources estimating the true number considerably higher. Over 270 were injured. Hundreds were arrested.
Mirziyoyev flew to the regional capital Nukus personally, declared a state of emergency, and within days announced that the secession provision would be retained in the final constitutional text. It was the most direct example in Uzbekistan's post-independence history of public pressure visibly altering a constitutional outcome — and it happened in a republic whose very existence the rest of the world barely knows about, built on the ruins of an inland sea that Soviet irrigation projects had drained nearly to nothing. The Aral Sea disaster, the Karakalpak protests, the constitutional compromise — all of it taking place in a territory most atlases still mark as desert.
Constitution at a Glance
| Detail | Information |
|---|---|
| Independence Declared | August 31, 1991 |
| Original Constitution Adopted | December 8, 1992 ("Karimov's Constitution") |
| Karimov Term Extended to 2000 (1st Referendum) | March 1995 |
| Karimov Term Extended to 2007 (2nd Referendum) | January 27, 2002 (5→7 years) |
| Andijan Massacre | May 13, 2005 (hundreds killed; mass graves) |
| Karimov Runs for 4th Term (Unconstitutional) | 2015 (constitution limited him to two) |
| Karimov Dies (Stroke) | September 2, 2016 (age 78, after 27 years) |
| Mirziyoyev Elected President | December 4, 2016 (88.6%) |
| Forced Cotton Labor Abolished | 2017–2021 (gradual elimination) |
| Mirziyoyev Re-elected | October 24, 2021 (80.1%) |
| Karakalpakstan Protests / Deaths | July 1, 2022 (at least 21 killed; secession right retained) |
| Constitution Rewritten (65% Changed) | April 30, 2023 (90.12% approved; 84.5% turnout) |
| New Constitution Entered Into Force | May 1, 2023 |
| Terms Zeroed; Extended 5→7 Years | 2023 (Mirziyoyev eligible until 2040) |
| Mirziyoyev Re-elected Under New Constitution | July 9, 2023 (87.05%) |
📥 Read/Download the Constitution of Uzbekistan
Read the complete, official text of the 2023 Constitution of the Republic of Uzbekistan:
👉 Read the Constitution of Uzbekistan — Full Text (Official)
A president who boiled prisoners alive and called it a kettle accident — while his constitution guaranteed freedom from torture on every page. A massacre in a public square that the world's democracies quietly forgave for the sake of an air base. A constitutional referendum that rewrote 65 percent of the founding document and used the occasion to erase the presidential term counter entirely — not extend it, but reset it to zero. What part of Uzbekistan's story surprised you most? Tell us in the comments below.
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