[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 154 (2008), Part 14]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages 20042-20043]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




         HUMAN RIGHTS, DEMOCRACY, AND CORRUPTION IN KAZAKHSTAN

                                 ______
                                 

                          HON. JAMES P. MORAN

                              of virginia

                    in the house of representatives

                       Monday, September 22, 2008

  Mr. MORAN of Virginia. Madam Speaker, I rise before you today to 
voice my concern over the current situation in Kazakhstan in spite of 
the Kazakhstan government's pledge to reform in areas of human rights, 
democracy and corruption. Kazakhstan was selected to hold the 
Chairmanship of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in 
Europe (OSCE) in 2010, and thus it is required to uphold the standards 
of this organization in the fields stated above. So far, Kazakhstan has 
failed to do so.
  Kazakhstan's government ratified the International Covenant on Civil 
and Political Rights (ICCPR) in 2006; it signed the Optional Protocol 
to ICCPR and the Optional Protocol to the U.N. Convention Against 
Torture (CAT) in 2007, and it has introduced some reform to the 
criminal justice system. In this, Kazakhstan should be applauded. 
However, the government has made almost no concrete progress toward 
implementing these pledges. As Human Rights Watch argued, ``Kazakhstan 
is not a country with frequent or dramatic government crackdown on 
freedoms and human rights. One finds rather an atmosphere of quiet, 
subtle repression.''
  This ``subtle repression'' can be seen by the government's failure to 
heed the concerns of local human rights groups that have been 
advocating for reforms such as the review of legislation on freedom of 
assembly, improvements in the prison system, abolition of the death 
penalty, reform of the judicial system and legislation to guarantee an 
independent judiciary, and ensuring accountability for torture. While 
Kazakhstan's government is about to chair OSCE, it has resisted 
implementing meaningful reforms in these areas. As Dr. Andrea Berg, a 
Central Asia Researcher, testified to Human Rights Watch: ``The 
government [of Kazakhstan] has certainly created a difficult 
environment for the exercise and promotion of human rights that is out 
of line with the OSCE standards and far less than what one would expect 
of the leadership of an organization grounded in human right 
principles.''
  Kazakhstan's president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, has been in power since 
1989. He has never been elected in a vote judged free and fair by the 
OSCE. Ironically, last year the OSCE described a Kazakh parliamentary 
poll, in which a presidential party won all the seats in the lower 
house, as being below the required standards. While Nazarbayev is 
credited for bringing stability to Kazakhstan, it has come at a price, 
with a weak and fragmented opposition that has called on the government 
to reform the election and media laws and to ease restriction on public 
meetings. During the most recent elections, in August 2007, opposition 
candidates did not win a single seat.
  There is a reason for the weakness of any political opposition in 
Kazakhstan: Since 2002, for a political party to come into existence, 
the party must have an initial conference of 1,000 persons representing 
two-thirds of the regions of Kazakhstan and a membership of 50,000. The 
OSCE, the same organization that Kazakhstan will head in the near 
future, denounced the restrictiveness of this law and

[[Page 20043]]

predicted that it would have ``a chilling effect on the development of 
political pluralism in Kazakhstan.''
  The media, a tool of the utmost importance in any democracy, has been 
dominated in Kazakhstan by government loyalists, while independent 
journalists are threatened and harassed for criticizing the president 
for government policies and practices. This, no doubt, has enhanced 
Nazarbayev's hold on power.
  As for corruption, Kazakhstan regularly ranks close to the bottom 
internationally. In 2007, Kazakhstan was ranked 150 out of 179 
countries by ``Transparency International'' league table. As a United 
Nations report on Kazakhstan's corruption so eloquently put it: 
``Corruption undermines the democratic development, performance of 
State institutions, and efficient use of resources. Eventually, it 
undermines development of society, especially of its most vulnerable 
groups.''
  So why should we care? Is it because Kazakhstan is an oil-rich 
country? Is it because of its proximity to Russia? Perhaps. We often 
seem to care more about the fate of any oil-rich country, or any 
country that delivers oil than countries in a similar plight that do 
not have oil. But we should also care because we claim to be a country 
that promotes democracy and human rights, a country that values the 
individual freedoms of humans, no matter where they live, no matter 
what natural resources they posses, and no matter what relations they 
have with the US. How can we lecture the world about abiding to human 
rights laws, anti-corruption laws, and judicial reform, when we cannot 
look straight at our friend's face and say: ``For the sake of your own 
people, for the sake of your region, you need to do better.'' And now, 
more than ever, before it takes the Chairmanship position of the OSCE, 
it must reform.

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