Private Law Firms Squeezed in Uzbekistan

After private lawyers in Uzbekistan were stripped of their right to act as notaries, some admitted that the system was abused on occasion, but critics of the move expressed worries that the state was restricting independent legal firms and strengthening its control over the practice of civil law.

The new rules came in a May 15 decree by President Islam Karimov, which said private notary offices were to be closed because they had been breaking the law by overcharging clients and colluding with real estate agents and car dealers.

An insider source in government says the Uzbek parliament will soon revise the legislation covering notaries.

It became legal for private firms to offer notary services in 1996, and the market expanded to meet growing demand, so that by the time Karimov issued his recent decree, 224 of the country’s 727 notary offices were in private hands.

A lawyer in the capital Tashkent said the government might have been prompted to act because some private operators had been overcharging customers and evading taxes. He said that while public notary offices charged between 50,000 and 70,000 soms (up to 45 US dollars) for registering the purchase or sale of a car, private firms asked for more than 100,000 soms.

Other commentators see the withdrawal of notary licenses as an attack on the private legal sector.

A legal expert in Tashkent said the proliferation of private notary offices had cut out lengthy waiting times.

“Clients started moving over from state notaries to private ones,” says the expert. “This decree is designed to stop this unwanted process; the state wants to control everything.”

Other commentators say the move follows action last year to tighten controls on lawyers. In March 2009, the Uzbek government began requiring practicing lawyers to sit examinations in order to continue working. Some 30 per cent were believed to have failed and been disqualified. The change was part of a reform imposed a few months earlier controlling the way lawyer practice and interact with the courts, and barring lay “public defenders” from the courtroom.

Human rights activists described the re-testing as an openly political form of pressure on the practice of law.

A Tashkent-based lawyer summed up the changes as “total control over the activities of lawyers”

“Any form of testing is turned into a test of loyalty. The same will happen to notary institutions,” he said.

With the disappearance of private notaries, more work will come the state companies’ way. But Farhod Tolipov, a political analyst in Tashkent, says public notaries are not immune from corruption and illegal practices.

This article was produced as part of IWPR’s News Briefing Central Asia output, funded by the National Endowment for Democracy.