The director of the Bureau for human rights and rule of law of Kazakhstan, a well-known human rights activist, Yevgeny Zhovtis, believes that the authorities should not prosecute journalists for disclosing state secrets. Zhovtis said this at an online briefing on the discussion of roadmaps for the implementation of the UN Committees’ Views.
Yevgeny Zhovtis is the author of the roadmap “Ramazan Yesergepov against the Republic of Kazakhstan”. This map was submitted to the UN Human Rights Committee in November last year.
It should be clarified that Ramazan Yesergepov is a Kazakh journalist, editor-in-chief of the newspaper “Alma-Ata info”, who was arrested in January 2009 on charges of divulging state secrets. The arrest, as well as the accusation, was preceded by an article published in November 2008 in the newspaper “Alma-Ata info” under the headline “Who rules our country – the President or the National Security Committee?”
The article contained photocopies of two draft memoranda of the Regional Department of the National Security Committee, sent to the chairman of the NSC, from which it followed that the NSC’s officers were interfering in the activities of the Prosecutor’s Office and courts.
Yesergepov was arrested on January 6 in the hospital, where he was being treated with a diagnosis of ischemic heart disease. And already on January 7, the National Security Committee of Kazakhstan issued a statement that this criminal case was intentionally politicized.
In August 2009, Yesergepov was sentenced to three years in prison. An appellate judge in October 2009 and the Supreme Court of Kazakhstan in May 2010 confirmed the decision of the first instance court.
In January 2012, Yesergepov was released.
Meanwhile, in December 2010, Yesergepov appealed to the UN Human Rights Committee with a statement that Kazakhstan violated his rights and, therefore, the International Pact on civil and political rights, to which Kazakhstan joined in September 2009.
The Committee, having considered the journalist’s appeal, sent its views to Kazakhstan. However, as noted by Zhovtis in his roadmap in November 2019, the Committee’s Views were not implemented.
And all Yesergepov’s appeals to the courts of Kazakhstan, demanding payment of compensation and initiating proceedings on the case on newly discovered circumstances in connection with violations of the rights guaranteed by the International Covenant on civil and political rights ratified by the Republic of Kazakhstan, were rejected.
Moreover, Yesergepov was persecuted by the authorities and law enforcement agencies, and as a result, in 2017, he was forced to flee to France.
All this is stated in the roadmap prepared by Zhovtis.
“We are only now taking steps to legislate the concept of “public interest”,” Zhovtis said at the briefing. “Such a concept should be enshrined in legislation and the courts should take it into account when considering such cases. The second point related to Yesergepov’s case concerns the law on state secrets. It is necessary to remove from it such a concept as “information for official use” and give a clear definition of state secrets. By the way, one of the recommendations was related to the law on access to information. It is necessary to prescribe as strictly as possible what kind of information is classified, so that there is no gap for officials, allowing them to hold people accountable. And one more important point is the information published in the press and the criminal liability for disclosing state secrets. The carrier of these state secrets should be responsible for the disclosure of state secrets, that is, the one who is authorized to keep these state secrets. If he divulged them, then he is responsible for it. And a journalist or a third person can be responsible for the disclosure of state secrets only if he was an accomplice in this process. A journalist is not obliged, when receiving any information, to check it for the belonging to the state secrets. He does not have such opportunities.
The human rights activist also noted that a journalist must inform his audience about something, based primarily on public interests.
“If you have not established the intent of this citizen to divulge state secrets and that he was complicit with the carrier of state secrets, then the journalist should not be held accountable for this at all, because, having received information, he sees a public interest in it,” Zhovtis emphasized.
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