Kazakstan: Restrictive Web Law in the Pipeline

Critics of the Kazakstan government have accused it trying to stifle freedom of speech through a new law regulating the kind of material that can be published on the internet.

Speaking to parliamentarians on December 10, culture and information minister Yermukhamet Yertysbaev urged legislators to adopt the new law, citing the example of France, where the internet has been subject to government regulation since 2000.

The minister said too many internet sites in Kazakstan contained obscene and offensive language, libelous statements and ethnically divisive remarks.

He insisted the new law was “not about smothering freedom of speech”.

Human rights activists disagree, saying offensive and inflammatory language on the net is already covered by existing Kazak laws. They maintain that the real aim behind the new bill is to prevent people reading material that criticises the government.

Several internet sites that the authorities do not like are already blocked, the most popular of which are www.kub.kz, www.geo.kz and www.inkar.info.

Tamara Kaleeva, who heads the Adil Soz free speech organisation, said the bill was prompted by the recent publication of what purported to be recordings of phone calls made by top officials. (See Kazak Media Crackdown Counterproductive, RCA No. 517, 23-Nov-07)

Kaleeva noted that the law had been drafted behind closed doors, without any public discussion.

“The minister says the bill has been already drafted, but we haven’t seen it,” she said. “There will be tight censorship, so that only the most loyal sites are allowed. We do not expect anything good from this bill.”

Chingiz Sharapiev of Kazakstan’s ministry of culture and information stressed that the bill had not yet been finalised.

“The concept behind it is still being designed,” he told IWPR. “There is no bill yet.”

Maxim Kaznacheev, a political scientist, said it was wrong of Yertysbaev to appeal to precedents in France and other European states, as legislation in these countries was designed to curb racism and other forms of extremism. These issues were already covered by Kazak legislation, such as the law on extremism and terrorism.

He also noted that the National Security Committee – the Kazak intelligence agency – had been tasked with overseeing how the planned internet law is implemented. The bill can thus be seen as a move to “increase the range of tools available to the ministry for controlling the flow of information”, he said.

Eduard Poletaev, another political scientist, recalled that in the case of the phone recordings, Yertysbaev had spoken to media editors and website moderators, warning them not to republish conversations between officials. Even so, material continued to leak onto the net. This was the reason why the government was now taking action, Poletaev said.

“They have decided to draw up a legal framework to threaten undesirable sites that their web domains will be revoked,” he said. “All this will be done under the plausible claim of securing state information - the problem is that our political elite equate the security of the state with their own security.”

Kaleeva fears the bill will severely limit the range of material that can be placed on the net, and even compares the bill with the punitive Soviet legislation of Stalin’s era.

Poletaev does not go nearly that far. He agrees that if the proposal becomes law, “internet users will face challenges in accessing segments of the web”, but argues that regulating access to the internet is “very complex”.

“To have absolute control over the internet, one must create one’s own network that is not in contact with the worldwide web, as has been done by North Korea,” he explained.

Anyone really determined to find alternative viewpoints will always be able to do so, he added. “There are chatrooms, there is ICQ [an internet messaging system popular in Kazakstan]… email and other tricks.”

An employee of an internet provider company who gave his first name as Andrei agreed that the bill was unlikely to “drastically reduce the number of users accessing sites that the government regards as disloyal”.

One internet user, who did not give his name, predicted that a restrictive law would have opposite effect to the one intended.

“If the government starts using laws to block sites, it will merely provide them [blocked sites] with extra advertising,” he said. “The methods of gaining access to blocked sites became publicly available long ago.”

Daur Dosybiev is an IWPR contributor in Almaty.