Ministry of information: Execute first, explain after?

On May 4, Mikhail Komissarov, Deputy Chairman of the Committee for Telecommunications of the Ministry of Information and Communications of the Republic of Kazakhstan, sent an order to eliminate the violations to the editorial office of the site ng.kz and its owner LLP "Your chance". "During the monitoring on the website http://www.ng.kz (“Nasha Gazeta”- “Our Newspaper”), a violation of paragraph 5-1 of Article 36 of the Law of the Republic of Kazakhstan" On Informatization "was found”, - the order said.

The editorial staff was requested to eliminate the violation within 10 working days. Otherwise, instructions will be issued  to limit access to this Internet resource on the territory of the Republic of Kazakhstan in accordance with paragraph 1-1 of Article 41-1 of the Law of the Republic of Kazakhstan" On Communications ".

The point at issue is that the owners of a resource should identify users that wish to leave their comments under publications.

As the editorial board believes, the threat of restricting the acess to the website is not based on the law, since the Terms for commenting are posted on the website and comments are under pre-moderation control. Besides the editorial board believes that the Ministry did not keep its promise to clarify the technical aspects of users registration on electronic resources. Moreover, in January the Ministry of Information and Communications in its response to Radio Azattyk's request promised to post on its website a sample agreement between an online resource and the user. That sample agreement still can not be found on the ministry's website.

Currently, the editorial board is working on users registrstion mechanism on its own without waiting for explanations from the ministry. But carrying out tests of the mechanism requires time since the registration should not violate the rights of regular users of the website. Therefore, on May 15 the acting editor-in-chief of "Our Newspaper" sent a letter to the Minister of Information and Communications Dauren Abaev and deputy chairman of the Committee Mikhail Komissarov requesting to extend violation elimination term till June 11.

The ministry’s response has not been received yet.

By the way, the text of the law "On Informatization", posted on the website of the Ministry, does not contain paragraph 5-1 of Article 36.