ASTANA: Kazakhstan's international partners should intensify their engagement to make sure the government carries out human rights reforms, even after its chairmanship of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) ends in December 2010, Human Rights Watch said today. The human rights situation in Kazakhstan has been declining, Human Rights Watch said. In the last days of its chairmanship, Kazakhstan will be the host of an OSCE summit meeting, the first since 1999, in Astana, the capital, on December 1 and 2, 2010. “The disappointing paradox is that Kazakhstan has been very active as OSCE chair but took few if any meaningful steps to improve its own human rights record,” said Rachel Denber, Europe and Central Asia director at Human Rights Watch. “It could have led the OSCE by example, but instead let its human rights record stagnate.” In anticipation of its OSCE chairmanship Kazakhstan had promised human rights reforms, particularly in the area of media freedoms. But throughout its chairmanship year, the government maintained restrictive new amendments to media and Internet laws. It also has blocked a number of websites and weblogs, though the popular Russian-language blogging platform Livejournal was unblocked several weeks ago. Kazakhstan has a vibrant civil society. Hundreds of nongovernmental organizations, local and foreign, are in Astana for the OSCE summit and for the review conference that preceded it, to discuss human rights issues at numerous forums. But generally, independent journalists who criticize government policies and practices face threats and harassment. During Kazakhstan's chairmanship year excessively harsh penalties for civil defamation were imposed on journalists. According to the media watchdog International Foundation of Speech Freedom Protection (Adil Soz), at least five journalists have been accused of criminal libel and five others were physically attacked by unknown persons. Proposals to decriminalize defamation have not advanced in the parliament. A newspaper editor, Ramazan Yesergepov, is serving a three-year prison sentence. Yesergepov was convicted in 2009 on charges of publishing classified information after his newspaper published an internal letter by the Committee for National Security in which the agency appeared to be attempting to sway a criminal investigation against a local businessman. Yesergepov's trial was not open to the public, and he was denied a lawyer of his choice. “Kazakh government officials point to the existence of opposition newspapers as evidence that there are no restrictions on media freedoms,” Denber said, “But in fact there is a chilling environment for freedom of expression.” Kazakh authorities also maintained restrictive rules on freedom of assembly and during 2010 have punished several activists for breaking them. Some of them had held one-person pickets. The authorities refused to register a major opposition party, Alga!. They rejected appeals to open a new, independent investigation into a car accident involving the country's leading human rights defender, Evgenii Zhovtis, who is serving a four-year prison term for vehicular manslaughter, imposed following an unfair trial. In July, Aidos Sadykov, a longtime opposition political activist, was sentenced to two years in prison for “hooliganism accompanied by resistance to the police,” in what appeared to have been a politically motivated set-up. The trial court refused to admit as evidence a videotape with exculpatory evidence. In 2010 Kazakhstan arrested dozens of individuals under extradition requests from the Uzbek government, extradited 4, and continues to detain another 29. While the charges have not been made public, they are reportedly related to religious extremism. There is significant, credible evidence that persons prosecuted in Uzbekistan on religious extremism charges face a grave risk of torture or other forms of ill-treatment in detention. HRW
