Dangerous driving

A car accident gives a reason to put an irritant behind bars

NEARLY two years ago, Kazakhstan was awarded the 2010 chairmanship of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). There was much debate about the country’s credentials. The OSCE, which monitors human rights and elections in its 56 members, has never judged an election in Kazakhstan free and fair. Yet some observers hoped that the pride of the one-year chairmanship would inspire human-rights improvements.

Yevgenii Zhovtis, Kazakhstan’s best-known human-rights activist, was one such hopeful observer. He believed at the time there was little else left that could push a country with a one-party parliament and growing oil exports towards change. But in spite of some legislative reform, the overall human-rights situation has since become noticeably worse, particularly over the past six months.

Starting this spring, an unprecedented wave of arrests of government and state-company officials and bankers on various charges—mostly corruption or embezzlement—has caused alarm. A number of people, fearing they may be next, have left the country. Some arrests seem unconnected with actual wrongdoing and have been widely attributed, including by Mr Zhovtis, to behind-the-scenes struggles among the elite.

This month Mr Zhovtis himself, one of the government’s few outspoken critics, became a victim. A deplorable incident gave the state a chance to silence him by throwing him in jail. In late July Mr Zhovtis was driving a car that killed a man walking on a country road late at night. Mr Zhovtis claimed he did not see the pedestrian and was blinded by the lights of an oncoming car. On September 3rd, after a two-day trial, a court in the Almaty region disagreed and found Mr Zhovtis guilty of vehicular manslaughter and sentenced him to four years in jail.

Although there is no doubt that Mr Zhovtis was behind the wheel and that a person was left dead, the verdict and the way the trial was conducted have provoked outrage. The defence was granted only about 40 minutes to prepare its closing argument. The judge then took only 15 minutes to deliver his verdict, which was several pages long, leading to questions about when it was written. The American embassy, international human-rights groups and the OSCE itself have called on Kazakhstan to give Mr Zhovtis access to fair legal proceedings.

His colleagues have denounced the trial as politically motivated and have formed a committee in his defence. They see it as a punishment for his 20 years of human-rights work. But there is one small ray of hope for those despairing of human-rights improvements. Mr Zhovtis, a lawyer himself, has already started giving legal advice to his cellmates.

The Economist Newspaper