Court, you are wrong! Ministry of Information stood up for Tatyana Kovaleva

Context: On October 5, the appeal board of the Military Court of the Republic of Kazakhstan issued a special ruling against Sotreport.kz  reporter Tatyana Kovaleva. She covered the lawsuit on embezzlement of money in the course of a state order. The judges accused the journalist of bias, violation of the law on mass media and demanded to delete several published articles. A copy of the ruling was sent to the chairman of the Information Committee of the Ministry of Information and Social Development (MISD) of Kazakhstan. On November 15, the MISD Information Committee demanded that Sotreport.kz "eliminated violations of the legislation of the Republic of Kazakhstan, and took measures to remove the specified articles from the website under pre-trial proceedings."

The editors refused to do this, since the special ruling is not a court decision and it does not contain any evidence of violations by the journalist, but it contradicts the law on mass media.

In early December, Sotreport.kz appealed against the ruling under cassational procedure . On December 15 Tatyana Kovaleva held a press conference and gave the detailed picture of the situation.

On the same day the Ministry of Information and Social Development of the Republic of Kazakhstan posted the following  message on its Telegram channel :

“The Ministry of Information and Social Development reports the following regarding the special ruling of the Military Court of the Republic of Kazakhstan dated October 5 of this year on the need to pay attention to gross and repeated violations of the requirements of the legislation of the Republic of Kazakhstan and principles of the media by T. Kovaleva while performing her professional activities.

The Ministry holds the opinion that in the articles posted on the Internet resource sotreport.kz do not contain grounds for suspending or terminating the activity of the website as it was indicated earlier in the letter of the Information Committee  to the Military Court of the Republic of Kazakhstan. "

As usual, the ministry could not resist calling on all media outlets to observe ethics, be objective and reliable. But still it promised: “The MISD will continue to protect the rights of journalists performing their official duties. Journalists have the right to cover  trials ”.

The MISD did not comment on the demand of its Committee of Information to delete the articles.