JULY 10 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – A court in Vienna acquitted ex-Kazakh spy chief, Alnur Mussayev and presidential guard Vadim Koshlyak of murdering two Kazakh bankers in 2007. The case involved Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev’s former son-in-law Rakhat Aliyev who was found hanged in prison earlier this year.
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(News report from Issue No. 240, published on July 16 2015)
JULY 15 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – A special commission on constitutional reforms started consultations to shift Armenia’s constitution towards a parliamentary democracy, media reported. Executive power, it is envisaged, would be held by the PM rather than by the president. A referendum is due at the end of 2015.
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(News report from Issue No. 240, published on July 16 2015)
JULY 14 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – The US State Department gave a human rights award to Azimzhan Askarov, an ethnic Uzbek sent to prison in 2010 for inciting ethnic fighting earlier that year. At the time, in 2010, Askarov’s supporters said the charges had been fabricated. The Kyrgyz foreign ministry lodged a complaint to the US State department.
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(News report from Issue No. 240, published on July 16 2015)
JULY 15 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Kyrgyz police detained MP Hajimurat Korkmazov for extorting a bribe of $100,000 from the brother of Nariman Tuleyev, a jailed MP, the AKIpress agency reported. The case highlights corruption among officials in Kyrgyzstan.
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(News report from Issue No. 240, published on July 16 2015)
JULY 3 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – The European Court of Human Rights (ECRH) in Strasbourg ruled that Russia had broken the European Convention on Human Rights in 2006 and 2007 when it detained hundreds of Georgians in Moscow and deported them. At the time, analysts said the deportations were linked to a Russia-Georgia spy row. The ECRH ruling will likely raise Georgia-Russia tension.
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(News report from Issue No. 239, published on July 9 2015)
JULY 6 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – The authorities in Uzbekistan arrested 500 police last year on various charges including corruption, torture and abuse of power, media reported quoting a source in the interior ministry. Rights groups have accused Uzbekistan of being a police state.
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(News report from Issue No. 239, published on July 9 2015)
JULY 3 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – A court in Khatlon province, south Tajikistan, sentenced Khusein Odinamakhmadov, 30, to 35 years in prison for recruiting Tajik men in Moscow to travel to Syria to join the extremist IS group, media reported. Tajikistan is worried about IS recruitment.
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(News report from Issue No. 239, published on July 9 2015)
JUNE 29 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – TBILISI — In the wake of the decision by the US Supreme Court last week to legalise same sex marriages, Georgian PM Iralkli Garbashvili promised a constitutional ban on homosexual marriages in Georgia.
His decision plays well to Georgia’s conservative society and highlights the divide between the country and the far more liberal West, whose groups Georgia aspires to join.
“As a prime minister and a citizen, I will do everything to include a clause in the constitution that defines marriage and the family as the union of a man and a woman,” Mr Garibashvili said in an interview with a conservative newspaper Asaval-Dasavali.
It is not the first time he has suggested changing the constitution to include the definition of marriage. Last time was in 2014, when parliament discussed an anti-discrimination bill required by the EU for further integration. The Georgian Orthodox Church heavily criticised the bill in 2014 as it forbade discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.
According to the Caucasus Research Resource Centre opinion polls, the majority of Georgians support EU and NATO membership, and the US is seen as Georgia’s main ally but 88% of Georgians also said that homosexuality can never be justified.
These views are easy to find on the streets of Tbilisi.
“Sure, the US is a friend to our politicians. But gay marriages just don’t look pretty, do they? Here, in Georgia, we don’t like such kind of people,” said Giorgi, a hairdresser.
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(News report from Issue No. 238, published on July 2 2015)
JUNE 24 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – BISHKEK — MPs in Kyrgyzstan voted to sack a judge over a row about biometric data in what civil activists described as more evidence of parliament’s authoritarian tendencies.
Protesters gathered in the centre of Bishkek to demonstrate against the apparent sacking of Klara Sooronkulova, a judge in the Constitutional Chamber of the Kyrgyz Supreme Court.
She had been working on a document that would have declared a law brought in last year forcing everybody in Kyrgyzstan to give their fingerprint data to the state as unconstitutional.
“Sooronkulova was dismissed only because she expressed her opinion as an independent judge,” shouted Nurbek Toktakunov, a lawyer, at the protest.
The law that Ms Sooronkulova took umbridge with decreed that only those people who had submitted biometric data could vote in a parliamentary election set for October.
She said that this was unlawful. Apparently irritated by her reluctance to accept the law on biometric data, the government forced MPs to vote three times to sack her. She survived the first two efforts.
“This is a clear evidence of complete arbitrariness,” Ms Sooronkulova told a newspaper.
It’s unlikely that protests will gather momentum but the independence of the judiciary from the executive power has been damaged in Kyrgyzstan.
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(News report from Issue No. 238, published on July 2 2015)
JULY 1 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – A court in Azerbaijan convicted 9 men of fighting for the extremist group IS in Syria and sent them to prison for up to 15 years, media reported.
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(News report from Issue No. 238, published on July 2 2015)