With the hasty conviction of Zhovtis, which comes on top of scores of other false cases, Kazakhstan is entering deeper and deeper into a human rights black hole, just months before Nazarbayev is meant to take over the Chairmanship of the Organization for Security and Co-Operation in Europe (OSCE)...
In a case that is sending shockwaves through Kazakhstan’s non-governmental organization community, Yevgeny Zhovtis, one of the country’s leading human rights activists, was found guilty on September 3 of vehicular manslaughter and sentenced to four years in prison. Prior to the reading of the verdict, Zhovtis denounced his two-day trial as a "political setup."
The advent of social networking platforms such as Twitter and Facebook has changed the nature of political dissent. But as this summer's unrest in Iran and China has demonstrated, authoritarian-minded governments have done their homework, and have kept pace with the revolution in communications.
The former chief of Kazakhstan's Committee of National Security (KNB) says the former son-in-law of Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbaev "might" have been involved in the kidnapping of two high-ranking bankers in Kazakhstan.
On August 24 the legal system of Kazakhstan faced «double strike» from Almaty intelligentsia. The Almaty artists, musicians and actors decided to support the journalists of Respublica. Business Review. Bank Turan-Alem (BTA) filed a lawsuit in the amount of 80 million tenge against the newspaper due to the damage, caused to business reputation. On the other hand, creative people had own opinion on that situation. (photo: Kanat Ibragimov is taking off his underwear in support of BTA-Bank)
The claim BTA Bank filed against Kazakhstan’s opposition newspaper Respublika may lead to the closure of the newspaper, said deputy editor-in-chief Oksana Makushina.
6 out of 10 of Russian-speaking people in Kazakhstan want to leave “the most economically developed and rich country of Central Asia”.
Last October, Adil Nurmakov, a popular blogger in this Central Asian republic, started having mysterious problems accessing his account on the popular website Livejournal.com.
Erstmals erzählt jetzt der in Wien untergetauchte ehemalige Chef des kasachischen Geheimdienstes KNB, Alnur Mussajew, seine Version von der Affäre des in seiner Heimat schwerer Verbrechen beschuldigten ehemaligen Botschafters in Österreich, Rakhat Alijew (im Bild).
In 2010 Kazakhstan for one year becomes chairman of OSCE, however the country leaders are not intended to carry out the reforms meeting the European standards.
