UZBEKISTAN Trends and Developments Contributed by: Sherzod Abdulkasimov, Nazokat Kamilova and Navruza Yunusova, PraeLegal Uzbekistan
and that can recognise and enforce awards from any seat. It does not remove that business from the gen - eral courts or make itself the exclusive forum; the two operate side by side. Two points temper the practi - cal effect. First, although the Constitutional Law is in force, the TIFC and the TICC are not yet operational: the TIFC must still be activated, and the secondary regulations of its bodies needed to run the TICC are still to be adopted. Second, even a TICC recogni - tion would ultimately be executed through the same domestic machinery – the writ of execution and the Bureau of Compulsory Enforcement – so that, out - side the TIFC itself, the Court can raise the quality and consistency of the judicial stage without, on its own, resolving every practical obstacle at the execu - tion stage. Technology, Digital Assets and a New Category of Dispute The second trend reshaping Uzbek arbitration con - cerns not the forum but the subject matter of disputes. A growing digital economy – supported by initiatives such as the “One Million Uzbek Coders” programme and the IT Park in Tashkent – has produced a technol - ogy sector that increasingly turns to arbitration, and TIAC’s rules have moved to accommodate it. The Rules of Arbitration of the Tashkent International Arbitration Centre 2021 (the “TIAC Rules”), in force since 1 Octo - ber 2021, allow a tribunal under Article 20 to order the production of documents and data on its own initiative and to appoint an independent third party to resolve disputes over privileged or confidential material, and introduce under Article 21 “experimental evidence”, enabling a party to demonstrate how software or an algorithm behaves in practice. A separate schedule of cybersecurity rules mandates baseline protections, excludes material obtained through hacking, and per - mits bespoke cybersecurity clauses. The cybersecu - rity schedule deserves particular attention, because it addresses a category of risk that most institutional rules still leave to ad hoc case-management direc - tions. Annexed to the TIAC Rules, the schedule sets a baseline standard of protection for the transmission and storage of case materials, applying by default to every arbitration administered by TIAC while allowing the tribunal and the parties to adopt a more exacting, bespoke cybersecurity protocol where the sensitiv - ity of the dispute warrants it. Its most consequen -
tial feature is evidential: material obtained through hacking or other unauthorised access to computer systems is excluded, so that a party cannot launder illegally acquired documents into the record through the arbitration. That exclusion aligns TIAC with the approach taken in a line of investment-treaty deci - sions on unlawfully obtained evidence, and it signals to technology and digital-asset users – the very con - stituency the TIAC Rules are designed to attract – that the confidentiality and integrity of their data are treat - ed as a matter of institutional policy rather than left to the discretion of each tribunal. Read together with the Article 20 of the TIAC Rules powers over docu - ment production and the Article 21 of the TIAC Rules provision for experimental evidence, the cybersecurity schedule rounds out a rules architecture consciously built for disputes in which the evidence is itself digital. The Constitutional Law extends this orientation by allowing TIFC participants to denominate and perform obligations in digital assets, including cryptocurrency, subject to regulation by the Financial Services Author - ity – a marked departure from the currency rules that apply elsewhere in Uzbekistan, and a signal that digital-asset disputes are expected to feature in the caseload ahead. The Other Track: Reform of the Domestic Arbitration Regime While the international regime is being opened up, the domestic one is being tightened. By Law of the Repub - lic of Uzbekistan No. ZRU-1141 of 21 April 2026 – in force since 24 July 2026 and, in the words of its title, adopted “in connection with the further improvement of the activity of arbitration courts and the strengthen - ing of budgetary discipline” – the legislature amended the Law on Domestic Arbitration. The reform pursues two aims: to professionalise domestic arbitration and to remove the public purse from its reach. On professionalisation, arbitrators of domestic dis - putes must now complete a training course under a special programme approved by the Ministry of Jus - tice and maintain their qualifications on a continuing basis; only a non-state, non-commercial organisation may establish a permanent arbitration court, which must lodge its founding documents with the local jus - tice authority; and a person who has sat as an arbi -
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