Two gay men have been arrested in Uzbekistan and face charges of engaging in illegal sexual relations. The incident is a rare example of enforcement of the law banning consensual sexual relations between men.
According to city police, the two men, who are both in their twenties, met in early September and moved into a rented apartment in Tashkent.
Police told media last week that they conducted intrusive, forensic medical examinations to confirm that one of the men had allegedly engaged in repeated sexual intercourse. Consensual sex between men is punishable in Uzbekistan by up to three years in prison.
Potential prosecution is only the least of what gay people in Uzbekistan are liable to face in their daily life. Intimidation — up to and including brutal physical assault — is commonplace.
This stance was given official sanction under the late President Islam Karimov, who remarked in February 2016 that same-sex relationships were a “vile phenomenon of Western culture.”
“If a man lives with a man, or a woman with a women, I think that something there isn’t quite right, or some change has happened,” Karimov said.
In some isolated instances, attacks are caught on camera and circulated online. That happened at the end of September, when a group of young men in the Ferghana region filmed themselves beating a naked man and forcing him to confess on camera to being gay. In that instance, the attackers were reportedly arrested, although the fate of their victim is not known.
International rights activists have appealed with the Uzbek government to repeal Article 120 of the criminal code, which criminalizes sexual relations between men.
