Kazakh Authorities Target Rights Groups in Coordinated Attack

There was an interesting new post on Kazakhstan at Human Rights Watch written by Senior Researcher of Central Asia Mihra Rittmann. Take a look at this excerpt:

The ongoing crackdown on local human rights groups casts serious doubt that Kazakhstan’s leadership is genuinely interested in reforms or improving its rights record.

On January 15, tax officials in Almaty, Kazakhstan’s largest city, fined and suspended for three months the operations of elections monitoring group Echo. On January 18, officials in Nur-Sultan, the country’s capital, fined the human rights group Erkindik Kanaty. At least four other groups – Kazakhstan International Bureau for Human Rights and Rule of Law, International Legal Initiative, Legal Media Center, and MediaNet – have been summoned to local tax offices in the coming days. They too are under threat of fines and having their operations suspended.