Trial in an actiona against correspondent of the internet-portal "Ratel.kz" Dinara Bekbolaeva has started in Shymkent

A journalist faces imprisonment for her analytical article "Did the Akimat of the South Kazakhstan Region paid for trolling Gabidulla Abdrakhimov?" published on "Ratel.kz" on November 14, 2017. Civil activist Suyun Abuldaev accused the author of libel (Article 130,  part 2, of the Criminal Code of the Republic of Kazakhstan).

Dinara Bekbolaeva wrote that the NGO  "Union of Youth" Memleket Tui ", headed by Suyun Abuldaev, won a tender of the Office of Internal Policy of the South Kazakhstan region for the amount of 2 million 350 thousand tenge for patriotic education of young people.The journalist tried to find out how the state order was carried out. However, it was not possible to find out how the budget money were spent: firstly, the tender winner turned out not to have a website and it id not report on its patriotic mass events anywhere on the Internet (By the time the article was written, the term of the state contract was coming to the end.) Secondly, reports of the services rendered that tender winners submit to the Department of Internal Policy of the South Kazakhstan region are not available to media. The regional akimat (local authorities) consider these data to be commercial secrets and refuse to disclose them. The journalist also gave a brief description of the personality of the protagonist and his activities in her article.

On March 2, 2018, Suyun Abuldaev filed a lawsuit. He did not specify exactly what kind of information contained the article he considered defamatory.

It should be noted that it is the second trial for Ratel.kz correspondents within the last two months. The first one took place in Pavlodar. It was a civil case concerning Jamilya Maricheva’s article. The court considered the information about the foreign  trips of the wife of a humble official to be a private secret and obliged the journalist to pay 200 thousand tenge as compensation of the moral injury.