The full 253-page text of the EU’s most expansive bilateral agreement in Central Asia is now published. A close reading reveals an architecture built around WTO accession, the Middle Corridor, and unresolved labour standards
The EPCA published on April 30th 2026 replaces the previous Partnership and Cooperation Agreement signed in Florence in 1996, when Uzbekistan was a newly independent state and Central Asia barely featured in European strategic thinking. The context today is entirely different, as Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine transformed the Trans-Caspian corridor, the Middle Corridor linking China through Kazakhstan, across the Caspian, and through the South Caucasus to Europe, from a secondary logistics option into a strategic priority. Uzbekistan sits at Central Asia’s geographic centre and holds supply chains that European industry needed to rethink. Simultaneously, President Mirziyoyev’s reform programme since 2016 has produced a measurable liberalisation, including currency convertibility, partial privatisation, foreign investment opening, and the formal end of the Soviet-era system of state-imposed forced labour in cotton harvesting.
The trade figures frame the agreement’s ambition, as bilateral EU–Uzbekistan trade stood at roughly $2 billion in 2016. By 2024 it had reached approximately $6.4 billion, a more than threefold increase in eight years. The EU accounts for around 10.4% of Uzbekistan’s total trade, making it Uzbekistan’s third-largest trading partner after China and Russia, and its second-largest export destination. Since 2021, Uzbekistan has benefited from GSP+ preferential access to the EU market; around 60% of its EU-bound exports now enter duty-free or at reduced rates, concentrated in chemicals, fertilisers, textiles, and plastics. Over 1,000 enterprises with European capital operate in Uzbekistan, supported by $12.4 billion in EU-linked FDI and loans accumulated between 2017 and 2024.
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The Treaty
The EPCA does not create a free trade area or grant preferential tariff access beyond what GSP+ already provides. Its trade architecture is designed to prepare the relationship for Uzbekistan’s WTO accession, currently targeted for the 14th WTO Ministerial Conference in 2026, rather than to replicate an Association Agreement. When Uzbekistan joins the WTO, the EPCA’s national treatment obligations (Articles 33–34) become fully operational, including the elimination of transitional carve-outs currently in place for tobacco, alcohol, and white sugar. The bilateral market access negotiations on goods and services concluded simultaneously with the signing in October 2025 will feed directly into Uzbekistan’s WTO accession protocol.
On technical trade rules, the most consequential provision for exporters on both sides is Article 54(2), as it requires Uzbekistan to complete the approximation of its standardisation system to TBT Agreement standards, including the voluntary nature of standards, within five years of the EPCA entering into force. Chapter 9 on government procurement is equally significant for EU companies: it creates a bilateral framework equivalent to the WTO Government Procurement Agreement, giving EU operators a legally enforceable basis for challenging discriminatory treatment in Uzbek public contracts. Chapter 12 on investment and services covers establishment rights and market access but deliberately excludes investor-state dispute settlement, routing disputes through the state-to-state arbitration in Chapter 14 instead.
Connectivity and Energy
The agreement’s most strategically loaded provisions are also its sparsest in text. Article 282 on connectivity commits both parties to promote sustainable, rules-based connectivity in the region, an implicitly referencing Global Gateway as the EU’s alternative to Chinese Belt and Road financing for Trans-Caspian infrastructure. The energy cooperation chapter (Articles 283–287) covers renewable energy, energy efficiency, and hydrocarbon diversification. Uzbekistan has significant solar and wind potential and has awarded major tenders to EDF, TotalEnergies, and Voltalia since 2019. Article 287’s language on diversification of energy sources, suppliers, and transportation routes carries obvious post-invasion weight today. The critical raw materials MOU signed in 2024, referenced in the signing context and joint statement, extends this logic to Uzbekistan’s mineral sector.
Cotton and Human Rights
Chapter 10 on Trade and Sustainable Development is the EPCA’s most reputationally sensitive provision. Articles 177–180 commit both parties to implement ratified ILO conventions and maintain labour standards without regression for trade advantage. The practical test is Uzbekistan’s cotton sector. Systemic state-imposed forced labour, which once mobilised two to three million people annually to pick cotton, was formally ended in 2021, a genuine achievement. But independent monitoring by the Uzbek Forum for Human Rights and a February 2026 Human Rights Watch report document that structural coercion persists: state production quotas remain, local officials continue to face pressure to meet harvest targets, and the government intervened mid-harvest in 2024 to lower contractual prices paid to farmers. HRW explicitly called on the EU to insist Uzbekistan meet its EPCA commitments on labour rights. The EPCA contains no cotton-specific provisions and no binding quota-elimination requirement; its labour leverage runs through ILO convention obligations and GSP+ conditionality, not through the treaty’s trade chapter directly.
The human rights architecture rests on Article 2(1), which designates respect for democratic principles and human rights as an “essential element” of the agreement, the standard EU formulation providing legal basis for suspension in the event of serious violations. In practice, the essential elements clause is most valuable not as a suspension threat but as a legal foundation for raising concerns in structured dialogue channels. Articles 3 through 6 of Title II create those channels, with regular political dialogue sessions at which democracy, rule of law, civil society, and human rights are standing agenda items. Whether the EU uses them with the same energy it brought to the market access negotiations is the question on which the EPCA’s human rights credibility will be judged.
What to Watch Out For
The WTO accession timeline is the single most important external variable. If Uzbekistan achieves WTO membership in 2026, a cascade of EPCA provisions (national treatment, import licensing obligations, or the government procurement chapter) become fully operational. The migration chapter is the sleeper issue, as the readmission obligation in Article 15(1) is binding immediately on entry into force, while visa facilitation under Article 15(2) requires a separate negotiation. With Uzbekistan’s population of 37 million, with a median age below 30, and an estimated four to five million citizens working abroad, primarily in Russia, the EPCA’s migration dimension may become its most politically consequential chapter in the medium term. And the institutional machinery of the Cooperation Council, specifically, its ability under Article 27 to amend the agreement’s annexes and issue binding interpretations without full renegotiation, is the provision that will determine whether the EPCA adapts to circumstances or calcifies. It is worth watching how actively both sides use it.
