Kyrgyzstan: authorities want to prohibit citizens to appeal to international courts

The coalition against torture of Kyrgyzstan sent an open letter to the President. Human rights activists ask the head of state to reject amendments to the Criminal Law that prohibit Kyrgyz citizens from challenging court decisions in international instances.

On June 25, the Kyrgyz Parliament, in a hurry, without sufficient serious elaboration and discussion, adopted in the third reading the voluminous draft law of the Kyrgyz Republic “On amending certain legislative acts of the Kyrgyz Republic in the field of Criminal Law”.

A significant number of changes in this package are, in fact, editorial amendments, which come to the exclusion from the text of the Criminal Law of references to the procedural status of “accused” at the pre-trial investigation stage.

“If we exclude the editorial amendments of the current draft law, we see that it is unprecedentedly widely proposed to expand the powers of the bodies of inquiry and officials of these bodies. It is proposed to expand cases of special investigative actions both in terms of persons, including witnesses, in time – up to one year, and in terms of cases – including cases of misconduct,” human rights activists write.

The Coalition is concerned that law enforcement agencies are trying to gradually level the positive achievements and concepts of the new Code of Criminal Procedure, which were originally laid down in it.

“The current procedural legislation still has not resolved the issue of increasing the degree of protection of participants in the process and observing procedural guarantees, the degree of proof of guilt and the elimination of falsification of evidence, provocation of crimes and compliance with the basic constitutional principle that all fatal doubts should be interpreted in favor of the accused. We have all doubts in favor of the prosecution,” the Coalition against Torture considers.

The authors of the letter note that the level and volume of evidence is still unacceptably low and represents only a proven scheme for constructing evidence that doesn’t exclude corruption.

The issue of ensuring the constitutional right to liberty and security of person remains unresolved in principle. The detention before a court verdict still has no deadlines. In some cases, continued pretrial detention constitutes unlawful cruel treatment of a person, without any proper legal assessment and reaction.

“Against the background of these unresolved issues in the new legislation, the draft law proposes to exclude the registration of applications and reports of falsification and other gross violations of the law by an investigator, an authorized official of the inquiry body, a prosecutor, or a judge. In other words, if the application contains a complaint against officials and doesn’t contain clear evidence of violations, it may not be registered, and accordingly no one will be involved in its verification and investigation,” the human rights defenders said in an open letter to the President.

The Coalition considers the exclusion of the norm on the review of the sentence in case of recognition of human rights violations by international bodies to be one of the alarming changes, which is the only mechanism for implementing the decisions of treaty bodies.

“It should be noted that in 2014 the Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court of the Kyrgyz Republic three times considered appeals from various entities regarding the exercise of the right to review court decisions that entered into force. Committers of the appeal challenged the constitutionality of the then-valid article 384 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, which provided for similar grounds for reviewing a court decision that had entered into force. On February 7, 2014, the Constitutional Chamber confirmed, that in normative unity, the Constitution of the Kyrgyz Republic guarantees the right to review court decisions based on international treaties. Thus, the government’s proposal contradicts the Constitution and the decisions of the Constitutional Chamber of the Kyrgyz Republic,” the human rights activists emphasize.