ALMATY, Kazakhstan -- A "worthy response" to Russia's soapbox chauvinists or a sign that Uzbekistan is closing the door to more measured foreign critics?
It depends on who you ask.
But whomever it is aimed at, Uzbekistan looks set to pass a law on "undesirable persons" that will provide a legal framework for deporting or denying entry to foreign citizens and stateless people perceived as having offended the country and its population.
According to the Oliy Majlis's press service, the law was drafted "due to the need to establish, in modern conditions of globalization, additional measures to protect the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Uzbekistan."
A final reading of the bill sailed through the lower house of parliament last month, leaving only senatorial approval and the president's signature for it to become law.
Foreigners can become undesirable because of "public calls or actions that contradict the state sovereignty, territorial integrity and security of Uzbekistan, provoking interstate, social, national, racial and religious hostility, discrediting the honor, dignity, and history of the people of Uzbekistan."
The law comes just months after two Russian chauvinists made deeply presumptuous remarks in relation to Uzbekistan and its people.
Yet it also comes at a time when Central Asia's most populous country is becoming less accessible to foreign journalists and activists who ask uncomfortable questions about its direction, explaining why activists and journalists -- especially Uzbek-born foreign nationals -- feel targeted by the law.
Prilepin's Law?
When the ultranationalist Russian politician and writer Zakhar Prilepin used a press conference in Moscow in December to taunt Uzbekistan and Uzbeks, it went down very badly in the country he was insulting.
Prilepin called for countries that send migrant workers to Russia to be "annexed" and for their citizens to be "taught Russian language on the spot...in Uzbekistan, for instance."
Zakhar Prilepin (file photo)
By disavowing documents on the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia could reabsorb former Soviet republics, he argued. "Since 2 million of your citizens are on our territory, we claim your territory," he added.
A robust response was demanded.
The Uzbek Foreign Ministry duly called in Russian Ambassador Oleg Malginov to protest Prilepin's statement.
The Russian Foreign Ministry said Prilepin did not represent Russia's official position.
Monitoring of Telegram groups by RFE/RL's Uzbek Service at the time found several calls for the type of law that Uzbekistan's lower house just passed.
The calls were repeated in January when another Russian public figure, Mikhail Smolin, questioned the history of the Uzbek people in an insulting form during a talk show in January on the Russian NTV channel.
Rasul Kusherbaev, a government adviser and former lawmaker who positions himself as a pro-reform voice in President Shavkat Mirziyoev's administration, sent Prilepin "and all those who want to take over Uzbekistan" an X-rated response on his Telegram channel.
More than half a year later, after the passage of the bill, Kusherbaev was triumphant.
"Earlier, a number of foreign politicians made humiliating and offensive statements against Uzbekistan. In the future, the new law will be a worthy response to such chauvinists," he wrote.
But nearly 30 human rights groups, mostly based in Europe and Uzbekistan's Central Asian neighbors, disagree.
They wrote in a joint appeal on July 5 that the amendments "represent a flagrant violation of international standards on freedom of expression and pose a serious risk of isolating the country."
That outcome would be bitterly ironic, given the political capital Mirziyoev has invested in pulling the country out of the isolation of his hard-line mentor and predecessor, Islam Karimov.
Or A Law For Labor Rights Monitors?
In addition to entry bans, the law on undesirables envisages two types of deportations for foreigners and others without citizenship. One is soft and the other hard, with a five-year prohibition on reentry in both cases.
According to the draft law, foreigners found to have transgressed the law can be asked to leave the country voluntarily within a period of 10 days. "If the [undesirable] person does not leave the country voluntarily within this period, he will be deported by the internal affairs bodies…[and] forcibly expelled from the country," it reads.
Other restrictions forbid undesirable persons from opening bank accounts, purchasing real estate, privatizing property, or entering into financial and contractual relationships with Uzbek citizens.
Uzbek authorities have said that Russia, which has a law on "undesirable organizations," was one of the sources of inspiration for the law along with countries like Belarus and Poland.
Little in the law's language seems relevant to Prilepin, who, after making his remarks, probably isn't considering visiting Uzbekistan any time soon, much less buying a house there.
But they seem much more applicable to foreign rights defenders -- including those born in Uzbekistan but naturalized elsewhere -- that come to the country to monitor and support their increasingly under-pressure colleagues.
The Cotton Campaign, a global coalition for labor rights in the cotton industry, released a statement in May about rights defender Umida Niyazova cutting her visit to Uzbekistan short after Niyazova and local journalist Sharifa Madrahimova were intimidated by a pair of men near Madrahimova's house.
The men, one of whom is a pro-government blogger, accused Niyazova of "organizing information attacks against Uzbekistan."
Umida Niyazova (center) speaks with an unidentified woman after being released from prison in Tashkent in 2007.
Niyazova is the Uzbek-born, Berlin-based chairwoman of the Uzbek Forum, an organization well-known for its monitoring of labor rights in Uzbekistan, including in the lucrative cotton sector.
She spent four months in jail in Uzbekistan in 2007 when the government was heavily cracking down on civil society and media in the wake of the government's killing of hundreds of protesters in the eastern city of Andijon.
Now a German citizen, she felt safe enough to return to the country in 2021 and, in 2023, when she was invited to participate in the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development's annual meeting in Samarkand.
"This time [2024] was the most hostile, for sure. Surveillance. Intimidation. I really got the feeling that they were trying to tell me: you're not welcome," Niyazova told RFE/RL.
In addition to the incident that she and Madrahimova endured in Ferghana, Niyazova told RFE/RL that she was unable to meet with some partners of the Uzbek Forum in Tashkent after they were called in by the police and questioned for several hours in their home regions.
"They were not charged with any crime. They were psychologically intimidated. [Police] asked them, 'Why are you working with enemies of our country?' That sort of thing."
The Door Is Open, Just Not For You
The shame of all this is that Mirziyoev's Uzbekistan gave even the most cynical Central Asia-watchers something to get excited about in the first four or so years after Karimov's death in 2016.
From being a republic that still had exit visas in force for its own citizens prior to Mirziyoev's arrival in power, Uzbekistan by January 2020 had become arguably Central Asia's most tourism-open country, having granted visa waivers to citizens of 85 different countries -- the United States a notable exception.
Will mass forced labor in Uzbekistan's lucrative cotton industry return when the rights monitors can't come back?
Even more importantly, in terms of their international image, Uzbek authorities led a successful drive to reduce forced labor in the cotton harvest, defined by the International Labor Organization as "the largest seasonal mobilization of labor in the world."
This achievement led to the Cotton Campaign ending its more than decade-long boycott of Uzbek cotton and, in 2019, won Uzbekistan the honor of being The Economist's "country of the year. "
But the second half of Mirziyoev's nearly eight years in charge has seen an uptick in prison terms against bloggers, deportations of foreign journalists and activists, the introduction of punitive new laws, and his administration's very own watershed moment -- the bloody crackdown on pro-autonomy protests in Uzbekistan's autonomous Karakalpakstan region in 2022.
And now that the news coming out of the country is not so good, Tashkent seems to want fewer critical eyes coming in.
Joanna Lillis, a correspondent for the same publication that awarded Uzbekistan "country of the year," has not had her media accreditation renewed since she applied in February 2023, and says she has been asked not to carry out any professional activities during trips to the country.
Joanna Lillis (file photo)
Mihra Rittmann, a U.S. citizen and researcher for Human Rights Watch, applied for an Uzbek visa in April, after her previous visit to the country at the end of 2023. Despite following up on the request multiple times, she was not granted a visa for her intended May visit.
Many Karimov-era Uzbek exiles say they are still on a blacklist that in some of their cases goes back to the 1990s. Others were allowed back, only to be shown the door later.
Journalist and documentary filmmaker Shahida Yakub, an Uzbek-born British citizen, was able to visit the country -- albeit after an hourlong interrogation about her work at the border -- for a family funeral in 2022. But she was barred from entering while on another private visit in April 2023.
Shahida Yakub (file photo)
There are plenty of other examples -- the 2021 deportation of Polish journalist Agnieszka Pikulicka-Wilczewska being one of the more headline-grabbing -- but prominent Russian chauvinists are not among them.
Indeed, "desirable" international visitors to Uzbekistan apparently include Denis Pushilin, the Kremlin-appointed head of the Russian-occupied Donetsk region in Ukraine, who is subject to sanctions from the United States, the European Union, and at least six other Western countries.
A statement by the so-called "Donetsk People's Republic" separatists on April 23 described Pushilin's trip to the country as a "working visit."
Reflecting on what he witnessed at a tech-focused business park in the Tashkent region, Pushilin called the park an experience "which we can adopt and implement" and noted plans to create an "eco-technopark on the basis of Azovstal," a former steel plant in Mariupol that now lies in ruins after being besieged by Russian forces in one of the most intense and deadly battles of the war in Ukraine.
"Thanks to cooperation with friendly countries, we have the opportunity to gain new experience in order to develop, increase intellectual capital, and introduce modern technologies and innovations," Pushilin said.
RFE/RL sent requests for comment to the Uzbek Foreign Ministry on Niyazova, Rittman, and Lillis's cases, but had not received a reply at the time of publication.