Tashkent, Uzbekistan (UzDaily.uz) — Securing a child’s right to child support in Uzbekistan remains a complex and fragmented process in which the burden of initiating, coordinating and monitoring falls mainly on the recipient, usually the child’s mother. This is the finding of a study titled “Child Support for Minors: The Life Situation and Related Services,” published by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in Uzbekistan with financial support from the European Union.
Steady growth in court cases
According to statistics from the Supreme Court of the Republic of Uzbekistan, the number of court orders for the recovery of child support for minors has risen every year. Since 2021, their number has increased by 35.32%, from 62,225 to 84,209 in 2025.
| Year | Court orders for child support for minors | Share of all court orders |
|---|---|---|
| 2021 | 62,225 | 37.3% |
| 2022 | 69,494 | 23.0% |
| 2023 | 69,927 | 14.5% |
| 2024 | 77,518 | 8.0% |
| 2025 | 84,209 | 5.5% |
In addition, according to the Supreme Court portal, civil courts issued 9,186 rulings in maintenance cases in 2025. This category is broader and covers not only support for minors but also maintenance obligations toward adult children unable to work and toward former spouses.
The authors note that the growing number of court filings reflects not only how common this life situation is, but also systemic problems in resolving it, in particular the limited effectiveness of pre-trial mechanisms and the narrow range of tools for voluntary compliance.
Legal framework and parties involved
Minor children are entitled to support (Article 95 of the Family Code of the Republic of Uzbekistan), as are adult children who are unable to work and in need of assistance (Article 100 of the Family Code). Support is paid by the parent who does not live with the child, who in Uzbekistan is usually the father. The recipient is the parent with whom the child lives, or in certain cases legal guardians, adoptive parents or guardianship authorities if both parents have been deprived of parental rights.
Divorce is not a prerequisite for claiming child support: the basis is the fact that one parent is supporting the child while the other is not contributing.
Three routes to enforcing the right to support
The study identifies three main routes, which do not always follow one another in sequence.
Voluntary arrangement. The parties agree on the amount and terms of payment without going to court. The least formal option, a verbal agreement, is rare according to the authors and cannot be tracked because there is no mechanism for registering it. A more secure option is a notarized agreement, which has the force of an enforcement document. The parties may involve mediators and lawyers; a mediation agreement serves as grounds for applying to a court for a writ of execution, which under the Civil Procedure Code of Uzbekistan is issued within 25 days.
Judicial route. This applies when no voluntary settlement is reached or when the recipient chooses it directly, since going to court does not require a prior attempt at agreement. Where there is no dispute, summary (writ) proceedings apply, and the court order is issued without summoning the parties. If the payer objects, the case moves to full action proceedings with a complete hearing. Under current provisions of the Civil Procedure Code, the minimum time for consideration is 16 days in summary proceedings and 45 days in action proceedings, not counting appeal periods and subsequent compulsory enforcement.
Compulsory enforcement. This is the most complex stage, involving the Bureau of Compulsory Enforcement, employers, banks and government information systems. The state enforcement officer sets a deadline for voluntary compliance, identifies the debtor’s sources of income, levies execution on wages and property, and, where necessary, applies restrictive measures, including a travel ban. The authors note that it is at this stage that fragmented inter-agency coordination most tangibly shifts the burden onto the recipient, who is forced to make up for communication gaps between agencies.
A paradox in social support
A separate strand of the analysis examines how child support interacts with the social protection system. Under paragraph 34 of Cabinet of Ministers Resolution No. 35 of 29 January 2026, a family in which one parent is raising a child alone may qualify for social benefits if three conditions are met at the same time: the family has been denied the status of a “family under state care” and a “low-income family”; the average monthly income per family member, after applying a 25% reduction coefficient, does not exceed 1.5 times the minimum consumer expenditure; and the mahalla “seven” recommends, within 30 days, that the family be classified as a “family on the verge of poverty.”
Applications are processed through my.gov.uz or the unified register, which automatically checks the applicant’s income, child support received, property, vehicles and deposits. The case is then passed to a social worker, who decides whether to place the family in one of the benefit categories, refuse, or refer the case to the mahalla for further review. A family’s status is reviewed at least once a year. The review is carried out proactively, without prior notice, and the family is informed of the outcome.
The authors identified a systemic contradiction: child support received is counted as family income and thus raises the family’s formal level of means, while significant expenses such as rent are not taken into account. As a result, even genuinely vulnerable families are routinely not recognized as being in need, and the very fact of receiving support intended for the child reduces the likelihood of obtaining additional social assistance. The study also notes that current legislation provides no financial incentives for payers that would guarantee monthly payments. The amount of child support is tied by law to fixed shares of the payer’s income (1/2, 1/3 or 1/4), which appears fair when the payer earns around the average wage in Tashkent (about 10 million soums in May 2025) but becomes insufficient if the payer’s actual income is lower.
A proposed proactive model through my.gov.uz
As a systemic solution, the authors propose moving from a model in which “the citizen seeks a service” to one in which “the state guides the citizen through the life situation” via the my.gov.uz portal. Rather than serving as an aggregator of individual services, the portal would become an environment that itself detects the onset of a life situation from government register data and initiates notification of the parties.
To achieve this, the study proposes distinguishing three categories of data. Information signals, such as a change in a parent’s place of residence or the registration of a divorce, do not in themselves confirm that a child is not being supported and serve only as grounds for neutral notification. Legally significant events, such as a notarized agreement, a court order or the opening of enforcement proceedings, may automatically trigger the actions provided for by law. Signals of a risk of non-payment, such as missing payments, accumulating arrears or the payer losing their job, should lead not to automatic sanctions but to a review of the circumstances by the competent authority.
The key instrument of this model is a digital profile of the support obligation, linked to the child’s record in the core state population register. The profile would not require creating a separate register of all children. It would be generated only where the non-resident parent’s contribution has been formalized by a notarized agreement, a court ruling or enforcement proceedings, and would contain information on the amount and frequency of payments, arrears and enforcement measures applied. The authors also propose integrating my.gov.uz with the register of child support court cases, which would make it possible to notify the parties of hearing dates automatically and inform the recipient’s employer of the need to release them to attend court.
Areas requiring further study
The authors explicitly present some proposals as requiring additional financial, economic, legal and institutional analysis, rather than as solutions ready for implementation.
These include introducing the concept of a guaranteed basic amount of child support per child, under which the state would cover the difference if the payer’s actual payments fall below the set level. The study also proposes developing special savings accounts for child support payments that would offer a higher interest rate than standard banking products, with funds usable solely to meet support obligations. Another measure under consideration is a mechanism similar to that used in Australia’s Services Australia Child Support system, which would allow expenses the payer incurs directly for the child, such as education or medical fees, to be credited against their support obligations.
Main conclusion
The study concludes that the current model focuses mainly on monitoring the payer’s compliance rather than on guaranteeing the child’s interests, so the effectiveness of the entire system effectively depends on the recipient’s ability to overcome inter-agency barriers.
According to the authors, a shift to a proactive, data-driven model would increase the share of voluntary compliance, reduce the number of court and enforcement disputes, and ease the burden on recipients, while leaving final decisions on legally significant actions to the parties themselves.
