Image: The state court premises in the historic city surrounded by the new construction 1.2 Methodology This report was compiled by the Centre of Public Administration at the University of Ulster with contributions from the Uzbek Forum for Human Rights and Land Home Justice, a network of independent experts and civil rights activists in Uzbekistan. The report findings reflect the cumulative effort of the parties who have been collating evidence on violations of housing rights in urban centres, governance and corporate failings, and violations involving land confiscations in rural areas. The monitoring and documentation of land confiscations was undertaken by the Uzbek Forum for Human Rights. The research on home demolitions involving forced evictions, property violations and, in part, destruction of cultural heritage was carried out by members of the Land Home Justice Network throughout the period 2017–2024. This collaboration is precipitated by a number of significant events. The first was the initiation of a mega-property development in the heart of Tashkent known as Tashkent City, which had prompted mass evictions, public protest and serious allegations of corruption. The second was the national government’s launch of a cluster system to reform cotton production in Uzbekistan, which precipitated large-scale land acquisitions from farmers and the redistribution of this land to clusters controlled by agro-industrial conglomerates. These events prompted independent research by the partners involved in this report, including interviews with victims, gathering case files and attending court hearings. These initial studies pointed to significant breaches of property rights, due process and the human rights of homeowners, farmers and businesses. In order to consolidate these findings, conduct further inquiry and publish the results, the researchers involved in these different streams of research initiated a collaborative study in 2021, which aimed to monitor state-organised land acquisitions and major real estate developments. From 2021–24, the collaboration team conducted periodic meetings in order to design the research methodology, implement fieldwork, review the results and write up the findings. State-facilitated acquisition of homes involving human rights violations in urban centres focusing on Tashkent and Samarkand were documented by members of the Land Home Justice Network. The network members have been documenting forced evictions in Uzbekistan since 2017. During the period 2021–2024, the network members took part in a collaboration to facilitate systematic monitoring and the construction of a case study database on housing rights violations. The network members have monitored 11 urban development projects involving forced evictions, gathering the testimonies of 40 victims. Furthermore, a documentary film has been produced to capture the human costs of the problem. Case files along with interviews, court documents, open-source data and other supporting documents were uploaded to Uwazi, a human rights database platform, for further verification and qualitative analysis. A False Sense of Legality 7