Prosecutors at the trial of 22 people accused of undermining Uzbekistan's constitutional order for taking part in anti-government protests last year have asked a court in the southwestern city of Bukhara to convict all the defendants and sentence 20 of them to prison terms between five and 18 years.
The prosecutors asked the Bukhara regional court on January 11 to hand parole-like sentences to the other two defendants.
Uzbek authorities say 21 people died in Uzbekistan's Autonomous Republic of Karakalpakstan during the protests, which were sparked by the announcement in early July last year of a planned change to the constitution that would have undermined the region's right to self-determination.
The violence in Nukus, the main city in Karakalpakstan, forced President Shavkat Mirziyoev to make a rare about-face and scrap the proposal.
Mirziyoev accused "foreign forces" of being behind the unrest, without further explanation, before backing away from the proposed changes.
The defendants are accused of several offenses out of which the most serious, "undermining constitutional order," carries a 20-year prison sentence.
The trial started in late November in Bukhara, around 600 kilometers from both Nukus and the capital, Tashkent.
Mirziyoev came to power in 2016 after the death of his autocratic predecessor, Islam Karimov.
Karakalpaks are a Central Asian Turkic-speaking people. Their region used to be an autonomous area within Kazakhstan before becoming autonomous within the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic in 1930 and then part of Uzbekistan in 1936.
Karakalpakstan is home to fewer than 2 million people out of a nation of 35 million, but it covers more than a third of Uzbekistan's territory.
The European Union has called for an independent investigation into the violence.