According to Norwegian Helsinki Committee, Zhovtis’ trail and sentence in 2009 was heavily disputed, and demonstrated a lack of respect for the rule of law by the Kazakhstani authorities. An early release would have helped to improve the standing of Kazakhstan in the aftermath of promises made in connection with the OSCE chairmanship in 2010.
The NHC encourages the authorities of Kazakhstan to release Evgeniy Zhovtis in accordance with his well-founded appeal, and to respect their international human rights commitments, most recently reiterated in the Commemorative Astana Declaration at the OSCE Summit in December 2010.
New regulations on the internet press
The trail of E. Zhovtis is a just a minor reflection of overall situation in Kazakhstan with regard to the human rights situation. As the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) has adopted a new framework law on internet regulations, it is likely that free media will face further sections from Kazakh government.
Even as Kazakhstan seeks to liberalize telecommunications market and position itself as a major IT power in the region, The Kazakh government has extended its control over the Internet. The state uses its significant regulatory authority to ensure that all Internet traffic passes through infrastructure controlled by the dominant telecommunications provider KazakhTelecom.
The government of Kazakhstan follows a multilevel information security policy, which maintains surveillance of telecommunications and Internet traffic in the country. Independent media and bloggers reportedly practice self-censorship for fear of government reprisal. “There’s an authoritarian regime in our country, as the number of users of internet sites and blogs is growing, the state and the government wants to control it, because they understand very clearly the role the internet played in the Arab Spring ”, said Janbolat Mamay, an opposition activist.
Google retreats
The sanctions on free press by Kazakh authorities did not go unnoticed. The freedom of expression within Kazakhstan became widely discussed subject for international media, especially after controversy over Google search engine. The web search giant- Google announced that starting from 9 June, 2011, it would redirect everyone who visited the google.kz domain to a new Kazakh language version of google.com hosted outside the former Soviet republic.
The move followed an edict from the Kazakh information ministry requiring all websites using Kazakhstan’s ‘kz’ domain name to restrict traffic to servers located physically inside the country.“ If we were to operate google.kz only via servers located inside Kazakhstan, we would be helping to create a fractured Internet,” said Bill Coughran, Google’s senior vice president of research and systems infrastructure. The move mirrors Google’s decision last year to reroute Chinese users from Google.cn to Google.com.hk, temporarily allowing them to bypass the censorship filters.
‘Not free’
Freedom House, the US pro-democracy think tank, ranked Kazakhstan 172th out of 191 countries in terms of press freedom in its 2011 report. Furthermore The Open Net Initiative, which monitors internet freedom, said that there was strong evidence that security services in Kazakhstan filtered and surveyed internet content. “The government has put in place a complex security system that is capable of state surveillance of Internet traffic and suppression of undesirable Internet content,” it said. The world’s major media freedom organizations have consistently joined Freedom House in rating Kazakhstan’s media environment “not free.” On almost all other key indexes, the Central Asian state ranks among the lowest when it comes to fundamental freedoms. Despite guarantees of media freedom in Kazakhstan’s constitution, journalists in the country self-censor amid authorities’ seizures of print runs of newspapers and use of repressive media laws to muzzle dissent.
One of the most visible catalysts for censorship has been the political scandal surrounding Rakhat Aliyev, Nazarbayev’s former son-in-law, who had served as chair of the National Security Committee for Almaty, and as ambassador to Austria before definitively falling out of favor with the president and his family. He was then sought by the authorities on charges of kidnapping and financial crimes. Having fled abroad, he began airing inside information and allegations, in the traditional media and online, in an effort to discredit the president. Any material related to Aliyev and his connections to the presidential family is filtered by Kazakhtelecom.
Other forms of media under pressure
News papers within Kazakhstan, especially those representing opposition to president’s Nazarbayev regime are in no better position, as they face strong pressure from judicial authorities.
A truck distributing the latest issue of the leading opposition weekly Golos Respubliki was intercepted on 14 January, 2011 by police and members of the Internal Affairs Department (UVD), accompanied by a prosecutor, who seized the 3,000 copies they found on the grounds that it was “disseminating illegal information.” Members of the newspaper’s staff who were in the truck were taken to police headquarters in Almaty and then released. Fortunately, the police failed to find most of the print-run and the other 19,000 copies were distributed.
According to members of the staff, the seizure was prompted by articles critical of the proposed referendum and alleged government corruption. “This is the continuation of the harassment to which our newspaper has been subjected. We were forced to close Respublika after the BTA bank’s lawsuit, which virtually bankrupted us”, said Tatyana Trubacheva, Golos Respubliki editor.
Related stories:
Jailed Kazakh human rights defender treated unequally
Human rights challenges in Kazakhstan
The Zhovtis case reaches the UN Human Rights Committee
