LGBTQ rights in Tajikistan
rights of LGBT people in Tajikistan
Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) people in Tajikistan face legal challenges and difficulties not experienced by the country's non-LGBTQ citizens. While same-sex sexual activity has been legalised in Tajikistan since 1998, same-sex couples are not currently eligible for the same legal protections available to married heterosexual couples.
LGBTQ people in Tajikistan frequently experience discrimination, harassment and violence from both the authorities and members of the public. Tajikistan is a Muslim-majority country with secular authorities.
In 2017, authorities in Tajikistan drew up an "official list" of LGBTQ citizens following two state operations named "Morality" and "Purge", suggesting that those named on the list would be required to undergo testing to prevent the "spread of sexually-transmitted diseases”. 367 gay citizens were named on the list, with 319 of that number being identified by the authorities as gay men and 48 being identified as lesbians.
In July 2022, the first-ever comprehensive anti-discrimination legislation in Tajikistan was allegedly drafted to contain gender identity and sexual orientation as prohibited grounds for discrimination, but these stipulations were dropped before the law was adopted. LGBTQ rights organisation ILGA-Europe stated in a 2025 report that "a working group was established in 2020 to draft the country’s first Anti-Discrimination law including sexual orientation and gender identity as protected grounds, by the time the law was adopted in July 2022, SOGI had been removed, leaving only “sex” as a prohibited ground for discrimination".
In 2022 and 2023, several raids were conducted by the police and numerous individuals alleged to be LGBTQ were forced to undergo HIV testing as a result. Those who tested positive were charged with “putting another person at risk of infection with human immunodeficiency virus” (Article 125, part 1 of the Criminal Code of Tajikistan) or forced to pay large bribes to the police in exchange for being released.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jan 8, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1114809. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1998, 2017, 2022 and 2025.
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This entry incorporates text from “LGBTQ rights in Tajikistan” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.