NOV. 5 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – The Kazakh Senate passed a bill that will regulate financing for NGOs, a move criticised by the West as cutting back on civil liberties. The new bill is similar to a law passed in Russia and limits NGOs’ access to funding from overseas.
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(News report from Issue No. 255, published on Nov. 6 2015)
NOV. 5 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – A court in Azerbaijan was due to start considering an appeal by jailed human rights activists Leyla Yunus and Arif Yunus against their imprisonment in August for 8-1/2 and 7 years for various economic crimes. Human rights groups have said the authorities imprisoned Leyla and Arif Yunus to silence them.
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(News report from Issue No. 255, published on Nov. 6 2015)
NOV. 5 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – The Kazakh parliament passed a bill which will ban mortgages being given in US dollars unless the applicant earns his or her salary in US dollars. The aim of the bill, which needs to be signed by Pres. Nursultan Nazarbayev before becoming law, is to reduce households exposure to potential bad debt and to give the ailing tenge currency a boost.
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(News report from Issue No. 255, published on Nov. 6 2015)
OCT. 25 2015, TBILISI (The Conway Bulletin) — Georgia moved a step closer to decriminalising the recreational use of marijuana after its Constitutional Court ruled that possessing 70g of the drug should not lead to a prison sentence.
The ruling means that Georgia now has some of the most lax laws on marijuana possession in the former Soviet Union.
The Constitutional Court was called to rule on the case of Beka Tsikarishvili who was arrested in 2013 and faced a prison sentence for carrying 69g of marijuana. His supporters have stage rallies which have attracted hundreds of people.
“The purchase and possession of marijuana for personal use does not qualify for a prison sentence,” the court said in a note on its website.
Previously, carrying 50-500g of marijuana could lead to a prison sentence of up to 14 years.
Supporters of decriminalising marijuana cheered the court’s decision, calling it a “huge step forward”.
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(News report from Issue No. 254, published on Oct. 30 2015)
OCT. 29 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Prosecutors in Georgia have opened an investigation into recordings of phone conversations that allegedly showed former president Mikheil Saakashvili discussing a potential revolution in Georgia. Mr Saakashvili is currently serving in Ukraine as the governor of Odessa.
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(News report from Issue No. 254, published on Oct. 30 2015)
OCT. 28 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) — Britain’s High Court decline an appeal by Maksat Arip and Baglan Zhunus, two former directors of Kazakh paper manufacturer Kagazy, against freezing their assets. Kagazy has accused Mr Arip and Mr Zhunus of misappropriating company funds in connection with Kagazy’s 2007 IPO in London and filed a $280m lawsuit. The trial will begin in April 2017.
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(News report from Issue No. 254, published on Oct. 30 2015)
OCT. 21 2015, ASTANA (The Conway Bulletin) — International human rights groups criticised Kazakhstan’s draft bill on NGOs as an attempt to seriously restrict civil society’s activities.
The new bill would hand the government control of foreign grants and also restrict the operational sphere of NGOs.
Dunja Mijatovic, OSCE representative on freedom of the media, said: “Introducing legislation that would put NGOs under strict governmental supervision, including the control of foreign grants, is worrying for civil society actors in general”.
The OSCE is Europe’s intergovernmental democracy watchdog.
The government has said that it needs clearer oversight over how NGOs operate in the country. Its detractors, though, have said it is far too similar to a bill introduced by Russia a few years ago.
Gulmira Birzhanova, a lawyer and expert in national and international media law, who works in the Legal Media Center NGO in Astana, said the bill contradicted basic constitutional rights.
“The proposed legislation violates freedom of assembly as stated in our Constitution,” Ms Birzhanova told the Bulletin in an interview.
Under the new law, the ministry of culture and sports will be in charge of assigning funds, which Ms Birzhanova said would hand it the ultimate control over NGOs’ operations.
“The ministry will act as a central operator that will distribute finances and grants to NGOs no matter if they receive it from the governmental budget or from international sources,” she said. “This creates a thorny situation because NGOs are often engaged in disputes against the government.”
Analysts have said that despite the criticism of the bill, the Kazakh parliament may be looking to turn it into law by the end of the year.
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(News report from Issue No. 253, published on Oct. 23 2015)
OCT. 22 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – A court in Almaty shut the Adam newspaper, saying that, by publishing in Russian only, it violated the law on languages. Human rights groups said this was a pretext to curb independent media in Kazakhstan. A paper linked to the opposition, Adam was created in March 2015 after its predecessor Adam Bol was shut down in December 2014.
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(News report from Issue No. 253, published on Oct. 23 2015)
OCT. 23 2015, TBILISI (The Conway Bulletin) — A court in Tbilisi acquitted four men of organising a violent attack on a gay rights march in 2013 that injured 28 people, pitting Georgia’s pro-rights lobby against a strong traditionalist group.
The four men, including one priest who was photographed carrying a wooden stool at the 2013 march apparently as a weapon, were accused of being the ringleaders behind the homophobic attack in central Tbilisi.
Human rights groups have accused Georgia of homophobia in the past but traditional values hold sway – the Church is still very powerful and has spoken out strongly against gay rights, – and the court’s verdict will have resonated with many people.
One user on the kavpolit.com website said: “Gay parades are not for the Caucasus. Well done to the priests and the judges. Let them go to Western Europe.”
In 2014, a poll in Georgia found that only 24% of people thought that protecting gay rights was important.
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(News report from Issue No. 253, published on Oct. 23 2015)
OCT. 15 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – In a landmark ruling that will irritate the Armenian government, the European Court of Human Rights (ECRH) decreed that Dogu Perincek, chairman of Turkey’s Patriotic Party, should never have been convicted in 2007 by a Swiss court for denying an alleged genocide by Ottoman Turks of thousands of Armenians in 1915. The ECRH said the conviction was an infringement of Mr Perincek’s free speech. Armenia has been campaigning for denial of the genocide to be a crime.
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(News report from Issue No. 253, published on Oct.16 2015)