The law was signed on 10 July, closing a track opened by decree UP-48 of 30 March, which reserved a site in the Tashkent City complex and promised a special legal regime. What the constitutional law delivers is unusually complete: on the center’s territory the principles, legislation and judicial precedents of England and Wales apply insofar as they do not contradict Uzbekistan’s constitution and the center’s own acts.
The institutions match the ambition. A Financial Services Authority licenses and supervises participants, and its acts take priority over national legislation inside the perimeter. A Tashkent International Commercial Court, with a first and an appellate instance and the explicit option of foreign judges, handles disputes alongside an international arbitration center. The governing council is chaired by Mirziyoyev personally, seating government officials next to independent international experts.
The concessions are long. Income from selling stakes in TIFC participant companies is tax-exempt, as are sales of securities on the Tashkent exchange’s quotation list and the dividends and interest they pay; VAT falls away for the listed activities, from banking and insurance to fintech, digital assets, Islamic and green finance. The benefits horizon presented when the project was launched runs 50 years, to 2076, and the March meeting record said seven articles of the Criminal Code would not apply on the center’s territory.
A legal enclave at constitutional rank is an admission about the law outside its fence.
Getting here took a fight rare in Uzbek lawmaking. The Senate rejected the law at its 16th plenary session and sent it to a conciliation commission; the reworked text passed the lower chamber on 1 July and the Senate on 9 July, with the court’s jurisdiction redrawn and judge-selection criteria widened in the process. The companion constitutional law on the Enterprise Uzbekistan digital-technology center was rejected by senators and has not returned.
The regional pattern is the story underneath. Astana opened the AIFC on the same architecture in 2018 and has put 114.6 billion tenge of state money into it since; Kyrgyzstan chartered its Tamchy zone on Issyk-Kul this month, English law and zero tax for 49 years; now Tashkent raises the stakes with constitutional rank. Three neighboring states are now selling the same product, a common-law harbor with tax immunity, to the same pool of capital, part of which is money weighing regional risk and Western walls at once. That competition compresses everyone’s margins and concentrates the routing question CAW has tracked since the Tamchy launch.
The official projections deserve the skeptical register: $20 to 25 billion a year in investment by 2030, at least 1% of GDP, more than 10,000 specialists, all before a single participant is registered. AIFC’s eight years show the gap between an enclave’s promise and its throughput. The conversions to watch are concrete: the first registered participants, the regulator’s first acts, the first foreign judge seated. And one meaning is already on record regardless: a state importing a foreign legal system at constitutional rank, inside a fence, has said something about the legal system outside the fence. Whether the enclave leaks outward into general reform, or stays a gated jurisdiction for those who can pay the entry, is the five-year question.