Dear President Nazarbayev: CPJ would like to draw your attention to your government’s selective and politically motivated use of civil libel lawsuits against critical journalists and their publications. In a trend that fosters self-censorship, intolerant public officials target critical news outlets with defamation lawsuits that result in crippling damages.
The administration drafted a bill that would take limited steps in loosening criminal defamation and weeding out some of the bureaucratic thicket that regulators have used to obstruct news media. Parliament was due to consider the measure in early 2009. The bill was intended to fulfill government promises to liberalize media laws in return for…
New York, February 6, 2009–Following a vicious attack in Almaty, Kazakhstan, on a reporter for a pro-opposition weekly, the Committee to Protect Journalists called today for the Kazakh authorities to conduct a thorough and transparent investigation and to bring the assailants to justice.
New York, February 4, 2009–The Committee to Protect Journalists called today for the immediate release of Ramazan Yesergepov, editor of the independent Almaty-based weekly Alma-Ata Info, who was seized by security agents from his hospital bed a month ago.
New York, January 20, 2008–Several unidentified assailants attacked Yermek Boltai, a reporter and editor for the Web site of the Kazakh service of the U.S. government-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, in Kazakhstan’s financial capital of Almaty on Sunday, the broadcaster reported. The assailants reportedly did not take any of the editor’s valuables, including his money…
New York, January 7, 2009–Kazakh authorities should immediately release Ramazan Yesergepov, ailing editor of the independent weekly Alma-Ata Info, who was seized from an Almaty hospital on Tuesday by government agents, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today.
Rewriting the Law to Make Journalism a CrimeBy Nina OgnianovaIn its 17 years on the air, Moscow-based Ekho Moskvy Radio has enjoyed, by Russian standards, extraordinary editorial independence. Nearly alone among Russian broadcasters in its critical approach, the station employs some of the country’s most outspoken journalists, who produce in-depth reporting on the most sensitive…
KAZAKHSTAN President Nursultan Nazarbayev and his administration played down the country’s troubling press freedom and human rights record as they successfully pursued chairmanship of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), the Vienna-based human rights monitoring body.
New York, June 5, 2007—The Committee to Protect Journalists calls on prosecutors in the Kazakh financial capital, Almaty, to rescind their decision to close the Web sites of the weekly newspaper Karavan and the online news agency Kazakhstan Today. On Monday, the prosecutor general ordered the indefinite closure of Karavan’s Web site for a May…