Kazaks to Get Access to Information Next Year

A long-awaited bill on access to public information in Kazakstan is to be finally passed next year, according to an official announcement made in October.

The law, which should make it easier to obtain information held by state institutions and thus make the system more transparent, has been eagerly anticipated, particularly by media workers, since public hearings on it were held in autumn 2010.

The editor-in-chief of the newspaper Kostanayskie Novosti, Sergei Kharchenko, says journalists depend on getting hold of information held by the state, but face difficulties in accessing official sources. In the absence of fixed rules for what the public is allowed to know, it is easy for officials to think up reasons why this is impossible.

Gulnazym Sagitova, a reporter on the Kostanai Tangy paper, said she was frequently fobbed off with excuses, a common one being that the officials in question were not authorised to release information and it was a matter only their superiors could decide.

The second report in this package looked at how hard certain categories of people in Kazakstan find it to get the free housing to which they are entitled.

By law, adults who were in care as children have a right to free accommodation supplied by the state. But the application process can be tortuous, requiring an understanding of what documentation is needed and where it can be obtained. Even a successful application can take years.

Renat Ujubaev of the housing department in Kostanai city said former children in care, war veterans and other groups were all entitled to accommodation, but each category had to submit a different set of documents.

This audio programme, in Russian, went out on Radio KN, a station in the Kostanai region of northern Kazakstan, as part of IWPR project work funded by the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

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