The Kazakhstan International Fund for the Defense of Freedom of Expression “Adil Soz” has sent an official appeal to the Minister of Information and Social Development Aida Balaeva with a request to inform whether Kazakhstan is working on a new law on the media.
Adil Soz recalls that in November 2017, the then Minister of Information and Communications Dauren Abayev (today he is the first deputy head of the presidential administration) said that in 2018, Kazakhstan would begin work on a completely new law regulating media activities. He also noted that the development of the law would take two to three years.
“The Foundation “Adil Soz” immediately applied to the Ministry with a proposal to cooperate in the development of a new draft law and received a response signed by Vice Minister A. Azhibaev in January 2018. In it, after pleasant words and explanations of how difficult the work on the project is, it was unambiguously promised, “The Ministry will inform you about the beginning of the development of a new bill in the field of information.” At the end of 2018, Bekzat Rakhimov, the then director of the Department of state policy in the field of media, said, “This will be a new law. We conducted a study with which version to go out into society. Will it be the law “On mass media”? Or will it combine the existing laws, that is, it will be a unified law on information issues, where several separate chapters will be devoted to media issues,” the Foundation’s appeal to Minister Balaeva says.
However, the Foundation notes that several years have passed, but there is still no public information about the work on the draft of a new law regulating the activities of the media and journalists, not to mention the participation of representatives of the civil sector and the journalistic community in this work.
“At the same time, other government bodies, in particular, the Ministry of Digital Development, Innovation and Aerospace Industry, are proposing legislative innovations that unreasonably restrict the rights of journalists and freedom of expression in general. Adil Soz asks to ensure transparency and collegiality of this activity and confirms its readiness to fully help in this work,” the Foundation’s appeal summarizes.
It should be clarified that here we are talking about the draft law “On amendments and additions to certain legislative acts of Kazakhstan on the promotion of innovation, development of digitalization and information security”, which is being developed by the Ministry of Digital Development, Innovation and Aerospace Industry. One of the proposed amendments in this draft is a complete ban on virtual private networks (VPNs) that are not registered with the authorized bodies of Kazakhstan.
“Probably, this indicates that the existing system of blocking Internet resources in Kazakhstan is recognized as insufficiently effective. Since we are talking about foreign jurisdictions, it’s difficult to imagine that representatives of their virtual private networks will line up in order to register in Kazakhstan. And the lack of registration, obviously, will serve as a basis for the Ministry of Digital Development, Innovation and Aerospace Industry of Kazakhstan to automatically suspend or terminate the operation of unregistered virtual private networks on the Internet in an extrajudicial procedure,” is said in the analysis concerning this bill, which was prepared by the Foundation “Adil Soz”.
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