STATEMENT of the International Foundation for the Protection of Freedom of Speech "Adil Soz" in defense of the journalist Amangeldy Batyrbekov

On September 23, 2019, the Saryagash district court of the Turkestan region found  civil activist, editor of the Saryagash info newspaper Amangeldy Batyrbekov guilty of defamation and insult and sentenced him to two years and 3 months in prison. The ground for legal action was the complaint of Bakhtiyar Abdiev, the head of the education department of Keles region, on a number of critical posts  on  Facebook by Batyrbekov.

The International Foundation for the Protection of Freedom of Speech “Adil Soz” states that the imprisonment of journalist Amangeldy Batyrbekov for expressing his opinion seriously violates the country's obligations arising from Kazakhstan's ratification of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. We believe that judges of all levels considering cases of violations of personal non-property rights should follow Art. 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the use of which is clarified by General Comment No. 34 of the UN Human Rights Committee: “ At least with regard to comments about public figures, consideration should be given to avoiding penalizing or otherwise rendering unlawful untrue statements that have been published in error but without malice.111 In any event, a public interest in the subject matter of the criticism should be recognized as a

defence ... States parties should

consider the decriminalization of defamation113 and, in any case, the application of the

criminal law should only be countenanced in the most serious of cases and imprisonment is

never an appropriate penalty. ”

We hope that the court of appellate jurisdiction, after hearing the case of A. Batyrbekov, will make a decision in accordance with paragraph 3 of Art. 4 of the Constitution of the Republic of Kazakhstan: "International agreements ratified by the Republic have primacy over its laws."

Besides the appellate judicial board should give a proper assessment to such arguments as “The court considers that the documents submitted by Batyrbekov are unreasonable and incomplete” and to  procedural infractions committed by the court of first instance.

As it was reported,  In October 2015, Batyrbekov was already sentenced to one and a half years in prison for defamation of Nurlan Saparov, the deputy prosecutor of the Saryagash district.

In January 2016, Amangeldy Batyrbekov was released on non-rehabilitating grounds, and a year later sentenced to two years in prison for the same article, but that time under part 3 of Art. 411of the Criminal Code of the Republic of Kazakhstan  - “Slander in relation of judge, jury member, prosecutor, person, executing prejudicial investigation, expert, bailiff, officer of justice”.A. Batyrbekov pleads not guilty.

We believe that the fate of Amangeldy Batyrbekov, none of whose publications  pursues any mercenary and illegal interests, is another mournful, but weighty argument in favor of decriminalizing slander and insult, that the civil society of Kazakhstan has been trying to achieve for decades.

October 14, 2019