Kazak Libel Law Changes Not Enough

Media rights activists in Kazakstan have welcomed legislative amendments restricting the use of libel actions and the penalties than can be applied, but say further reforms are needed to ensure freedom of expression.

The changes passed by Kazakstan’s parliament on April 16 prohibit defamation actions launched against the media by institutions rather than individuals. Instead, businesses and public-sector organisations can demand the publication of a retraction.

The amendments also reduce the penalties that a court can apply in libel cases. In most cases, a defendant found guilty can no longer be sentenced to detention or other restrictions on his or her liberty. In lawsuits claiming defamation of the Kazak president or judges – which are treated as special cases – imprisonment is replaced with lesser penalties such as house arrest.

Kazakstan has long faced international criticism for the inclusion of libel in criminal as well as civil law statutes.

Contrary to the hopes of campaigners who have been lobbying for change for a decade, defamation still exists as a criminal offence.

But changes introduced in February mean a criminal libel case can only be brought if the defendant has already lost a defamation action under civil law less than one year beforehand. The only exception, left over from previous legislation, is that prosecution can take place if the alleged libel accuses the plaintiff of corruption or other grave crimes.

Member of parliament Murat Abenov said banning institutional defamation lawsuits was a positive move. In the past, he said, the ability to bring such actions had allowed state officials and private business owners to wield their organisational strength as “a big stick with which to defend themselves against justifiable criticism”.

Media activists say the changes fall short of the full decriminalisation they were pressing for, so as to entirely rule out the use of prosecutions to muzzle journalists who take on the rich and powerful, and to force independent media out of existence.

The media rights group Adil Soz has calculated that of the 85 libel actions against media organisations last year, 23 were of them were brought by institutions, not individuals.

Adil Soz issued a statement praising parliament for the April amendments, but insisting that libel must now be deleted altogether from the list of criminal offences, defamation claims should be subject to a time-limit from the date of the alleged offence, and the size of damages payable to individuals should be capped.

While noting that the number of prosecutions against journalists under criminal fell from 42 to 18 last year, Adil Soz said the improvement was mainly due to Kazak government taking a more cautious line with the media during its 2010 chairmanship of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe. Even so, the total size of damage awards increased, it said.

Journalists working for independent and opposition-aligned media outlets say the frequency of lawsuits and the amount of damages sought from them are evidence that the law is used to silence critical voices.

Last year, for example, the opposition newspaper Vzglyad was ordered to pay damages of just over 100,000 US dollars after losing a defamation case, and it is now close to bankruptcy.

Uralskaya Nedelya, an independent weekly in western Kazakstan, is also threatened with closure after being sued by the provincial administration and numerous private businesses. In just one of these cases, an oil-industry company was awarded 140,000 dollars. As the paper’s chief editor Tamar Yeslyamova notes, there is a big discrepancy between the treatment of Uralskaya Nedelya and that of state-run newspapers, which are rarely forced to pay damages of more than 200 dollars when they lose libel cases.

The head of the Media Alliance of Kazakstan, Adil Jalilov, said that even with some positive changes in place, ways could still be found to go after the media.

“Criminal and administrative [civil] law cases against journalists can still be launched using a number of other legislative acts, notably the privacy law, the law on the Leader of the Nation [President Nursultan Nazarbaev], legislation governing the internet and so on,” Jalilov said.

In its annual Freedom of the Press ranking, the United States-based watchdog Freedom House put Kazakstan in 172nd place on a list of 196 countries surveyed, three places down on its position last year.

Anna Drelikh is an IWPR contributor in Almaty.

This article was produced jointly under two IWPR projects: Building Central Asian Human Rights Protection & Education Through the Media, funded by the European Commission; and the Human Rights Reporting, Confidence Building and Conflict Information Programme, funded by the Foreign Ministry of Norway.

The contents of this article are the sole responsibility of IWPR and can in no way be taken to reflect the views of either the European Union or the Foreign Ministry of Norway.