KZBlog

There’s been some big changes in my lifestyle that have prevented me from spending much time on this blog for the past two weeks, but I noticed an item today that is well worth mentioning. Leila at Kazakhstan.Neweurasia has an article up about a blogger on trial for insulting the honor and dignity of the President, which is a crime in Kazakhstan. In this case he implied that Nazarbayev assisted in covering up the details of the murder of Sarsenbayev. I encourage you to read the whole article, but the most interesting points were:

• The man in question posted to KUB.kz, a general group blog, and not on his own personal blog.
• As Leila puts it:
  

  He is not an Internet-savvy young cyber-dissident uploading material through proxy servers that you would imagine. His name is Kazis Toguzbayev, he is a General, a pensioner, a journalist, and a member of “Alga” party.”

• He was found guilty, although his defense was that the President should have to feel insulted and it would be difficult to imagine a common pensioner being able to truly insult the President. A good defense, even if it didn’t work.

(ADDENDUM) Having mulled this over for the past 12 hours, it occurs to me that there are some other interesting features to this case. The KUB website, while it uses a .kz address, is registered in Hong Kong. (Now we will remember that www.borat.kz was taken down in part because the government wanted to push a law that would require users of .kz to be located in Kazakhstan. That and apparently borat.kz was registered in fake names–I mean these were the justifications beyond the obvious motive…). The gentleman accused of the crime is a resident of Kazakhstan. So even though the website is registered elsewhere, the fact that it uses the .kz address and/or the fact that the ‘criminal’ resides in Kazakhstan puts this in Kazakhstan jurisdiction. Interesting conclusions for the Kazakhstan government to make.

Secondly, the law regarding upholding the dignity of the President refers to “mass media” (In other words, incidentally, it is not a crime to insult the President privately). As Leila pointed out, the courts seem comfortable declaring that the Internet is mass media, and of the same type as a newspaper or magazine, despite the fact that this very case shows a huge difference between newspapers and websites i.e. comment boards. We will also note that Kub.kz is not being accused of a crime for hosting the offensive material. So I should be safe with that comment on one of my posts about how Nazarbayev is a dictator; I didn’t say it!

Two subtle points of legislation–jurisdiction and the classification of the Internet–appear to have been decided in a case that overall is not ridiculously significant. A well-known public figure did not step forward, for example, with evidence that Nazarbayev was involved in some dirty business, which would have caused a much larger public scandal, done more damage to the reputation of the President. etc.. I suspect that this case was a test case, to set a precedent, and possibly a warning shot to the rest of us.