JULY 19 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — A court in Petropavlovsk, in northern Kazakhstan, sentenced a man to seven years in prison for joining the IS extremist group. According to the court, the man travelled to Syria in 2012. Warning of a growing IS recruitment drive, Kazakhstan’s security services have said they will intensify their clampdown on Islamic extremism.
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(News report from Issue No. 290, published on July 22 2016)
JULY 19 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — A Tajik court jailed Mukhammadi Rakhmatullo, alleged leader of Salafi, a banned conservative Islamic movement in Tajikistan, for seven years in prison. Rakhmatullo had allegedly returned to Tajikistan after a period working abroad and had continued to run the banned Salafi opposition movement. He was arrested in February during a mass security operation that jailed dozens of Salafists.
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(News report from Issue No. 290, published on July 22 2016)
JULY 19 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — Turkmenistan’s President Kurbanguly Berdymukhamedov ordered the Council of Elders to vote on a new constitution in mid-September. The Council of Elders is an advisory body chaired by Mr Berdymukhamedov widely believed to rubber-stamp his diectorates. A proposed new constitution that would effectively extend Mr Berdymukhamedov’s term as president was published in February.
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(News report from Issue No. 290, published on July 22 2016)
ALMATY, JULY 12 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — In a case that media freedom lobbyists say shows how Kazakhstan is muzzling independent media, a court in Almaty ordered the opposition newspaper Tribuna/ Ashyk Alan to pay 5m tenge ($14,836) in damages to government official Sultanbek Syzdykov after it described him as corrupt for stealing 23m tenge ($68,249) from the budget of the 2011 Asian Games.
Although police launched an investigation into Mr Syzdykov, the court ruled that the newspaper could not describe him as corrupt because he had repaid the amount he had stolen.
Denis Krivosheyev, the Tribuna journalist who wrote the story, said that the verdict was nonsense.
“This government official was convicted of corruption,” he told reporters outside the court. “It is a fact that no one denies.”
Western government and media freedom groups have accused Kazakhstan of cracking down on free speech. Earlier this year, Guzyal Baidalinova, editor of the opposition Nakanune.kz website, was convicted of slander against Kazkommertsbank, Kazakhstan’s largest bank. She was released from prison, also on July 12, although her guilty sentence remains.
The government has cracked down on the media this year, partly as a reaction to a worsening eco- nomic outlook and to increasing unrest in the country.
Yermurat Bapi, a trustee of the journalists’ union in Kazakhstan told The Conway Bulletin that the media environment was worsening.
“This authoritarian system that was developed over 15 to 20 years has become obsolete, it is dying and with its last gasp is trying to preserve and protect itself through bans, persecutions and the courts,” he said.
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(News report from Issue No. 289, published on July 15 2016)
BISHKEK, JULY 11 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — A court in Canada dismissed a notion put forward by three companies and a businessman locked in legal disputes with the Kyrgyz government that would have threatened state-owned Kyrgyzaltyn’s ownership of shares in Toronto-listed Centerra Gold.
The decision is a major victory, after years of wrangling, for Kyrgyzstan which wanted to ringfence a 32.7% stake in Toronto-listed Centerra Gold owned by state gold company Kyrgyzaltyn. It’s also a relief for Centerra Gold, which owns the Kumtor gold mine — Kyrgyzstan’s single largest industrial asset.
The claimants — Canadian miner Stans Energy, Turkish construction companies Sistem and Entes and the Latvian citizen Valeri Belokon — had said that the Canadian court should freeze and seize the stake to enforce other arbitration rulings involving Kyrgyzstan. They said that the shares may be officially owned by Kyrgyzaltyn but that the Kyrgyz state was the beneficial owner.
The judge, Justice Conway, disagreed, though, and ruled that Kyrgyzaltyn and Kyrgyzstan could not be treated as the same entity.
The ruling means that the claimants will have to find other jurisdictions to pursue their legal claims against Kyrgyzstan.
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(News report from Issue No. 289, published on July 15 2016)
BISHKEK, JULY 12 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — Kyrgyzstan’s Supreme Court ordered a retrial into the sentencing of human rights activist Azimzhan Askarov in 2010 to life in prison for involvement in a murder and for inciting ethnic hatred.
The announcement disappointed human rights activists who have said that Askarov, an ethnic Uzbek, is a political prisoner who was made into a scapegoat after fighting between Uzbeks and Kyrgyz in Osh killed at least 400 people. They wanted the
Supreme Court to bow to pressure from the UN and US to release the 65-year-old Askarov.
Askarov’s case has strained relations between Kyrgyzstan and the US, which last year called him a political prisoner.
Analysts in Bishkek have told The Bulletin that the Supreme Court may give in to pressure to hold a retrial but that it would be, politically, very difficult for a court to come to a different outcome at a new trial.
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(News report from Issue No. 289, published on July 15 2016)
JULY 12 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — A court in Aktobe, northern Kazakhstan, sentenced 12 people who had allegedly tried to join the ranks of the extremist IS group in February. The suspects received sentences of between 6 and 8 years in prison. The court said the group had tried to travel to Syria to join an IS training camp. Kazakhstan’s government has repeatedly emphasised its efforts towards combating Islamic extremism.
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(News report from Issue No. 289, published on July 15 2016)
JULY 1 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — A court in Azerbaijan sentenced Fikret Faramazoglu, editor of theinvestgiative jam.az newspaper, to three months in jail for extortion. Jam.az reports on court cases involving government officials, with a focus on the national security department. Media lobby groups say the charges are false.
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(News report from Issue No. 288, published on July 8 2016)
TBILISI, JUNE 26 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — Roughly 200 people protested in front of the former parliament building in central Tbilisi against what they said was an excessively draconian and ineffective zero tolerance policy towards drugs.
The protest was one of several organised this year against the drug law in the run-up to a parliamentary election.
In Georgia, possession of even the smallest amount of drugs is considered a criminal offence that could lead to a jail sentence. The law allows police officers to stop people on the street and test them for drug use.
The Georgian Dream coalition takes a conservative approach to society, pulling in support from Georgia’s traditional Orthodox Christian society, but it risks alienating more liberal-minded voters ahead of the election that analysts have said will be hard fought.
Under the slogan ‘Don’t punish us’, demonstrators demanded the decriminalisation of drugs and the allocation of resources instead to social projects and drug rehabilitation schemes.
David Otiashvili, one of the organisers of the protest, said the current legislation was not effective and that it was being used by the police as a tool to impose control over society.
“The legislation is really strict and harsh and it focuses only on punishing people. Georgia is testing 50,000 to 60,000 people per year and it costs us millions and millions. And we know that this drug test does nothing good, there is zero effect,” he said.
The previous government under President Mikheil Saakashvili imposed the zero tolerance rules.
Tea Kordzadze, one of the protesters, said: “What has this repressive drug policy brought to Georgia? The number of drug users has increased.”
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(News report from Issue No. 287, published on July 1 2016)
JUNE 27 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – In an effort to raise cash to pull through a long financial downturn, Kyrgyzstan’s economy ministry has prepared a bill that would impose an additional tax on luxury cars and large and expensive apartments, media reported. The prospect of a so-called luxury tax is a fairly radical departure from the norm in Central Asia where the rich are relatively lightly taxed.
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(News report from Issue No. 287, published on July 1 2016)