Conflicts

Open Dialog: Article on the reform of the criminal law in Kazakhstan

Published

11 years ago

February 4, 2015

Please find below the Open Dialogue Foundation's newest article on the reform of the criminal law in Kazakhstan, which grossly violates the international obligations of the country in the field of human rights.

The publication is an analysis of a set of articles introduced or amended to the Kazakh criminal legislation as of 1 January, 2015. It refers to the restrictions and limitations imposed on and related to the principles of freedom of assembly, freedom of speech, right to life and protection from violence, right to a fair trial, right to a legal defender and rights of prisoners.

The article proves that the reform initiated by the President Nursultan Nazarbayev (pictured) and Kazakhstan’s General Prosecutor’s Office is a continuation of the governmental process of shrinking of space for civil society activists, independent journalists and political oppositionists in the country.

Instead, Kazakhstan often uses the changes in the legislation to spread self-promoting propaganda among its international partners, pretending to be updating the law to make it more in line with international standards. The reform of the criminal law in Kazakhstan has been criticised i.a. by Austria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Ireland, Switzerland and the UK during the UN Human Rights Council's Universal Periodic Review in November 2014 (LINK).

The full article may be found HERE (available also in French, Spanish, Russian, Ukrainian and Polish language versions).

We, therefore, call on the international civil society, the international organisations and institutions to exert all possible pressure on the Kazakh authorities, demanding that they review the reform of the criminal law in accordance with the recommendations of Kazakh and international NGOs, the European Parliament, the OSCE, and the Council of Europe, so they refer the new codes for examination to the Venice Commission, as well as engage foreign and independent experts in the field of criminal law and protection of human rights in the works aimed at the improvement of the codes.

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