The First 100 Days of the Kazakh OSCE Chairmanship

Three months into Kazakhstan's chairmanship of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), Astana still has not met the critical human dimension commitments it pledged at the 2007 OSCE Madrid Ministerial.  Key democratic freedoms are tightly circumscribed, including freedom of expression, assembly, and association; and access to information, while political parties, civil society organizations and independent media are prevented from operating freely. 

As President Nazarbayev prepares to visit Washington for the international nuclear security summit, and perhaps a bilateral meeting with President Obama, Kazakhstan's best-known human rights defender, Yevgeniy Zhovtis, remains in jail after a trial and investigation so marred by procedural violations as to have constituted a miscarriage of justice.   

Speakers at this Open Society Institute forum will discuss human rights developments in Kazakhstan during the first 100 days of that country's OSCE chairmanship, with a particular focus on freedom of speech and of the media. Together with the audience, the panel will consider if Kazakhstan's OSCE chairmanship agenda can still be leveraged to foster open society values in Kazakhstan and in the region.  

Speakers

• Vyacheslav Abramov, Executive Director, MediaNet
• Yevgeniya Plakhina, Journalist, Respublika
• Anastasia Knauss, Kazakhstan International Bureau for Human Rights and Rule of Law