2006 has not so far proved to be a very positive year for Kazakh media, with more restrictive media bill being adopted in July 2006, and every other news item being a closure of a newspaper or a trial of a journalist. The OSCE, which Kazakhstan hopes to chair in 2009, has repeatedly tried to address the Government on amending the bill, but in vain.

Internet media too has lately experienced more attention from the state, with the Minister of Culture and Information promising to come up with a policy on the regulation of Internet by the end of the year. Currently, the new bill on information is being discussed in Mazhilis (link in Russian). The bill defines a website as a “collection of software and technical data in one domain on the web, which has common navigation tools and personal data (electronic information resources of a personal character) - data on facts, events, circumstances of lives of individuals and/or data that identify him/her.”

What about blogs? A relatively new phenomenon in Kazakhstan (I remember seeing the first online journals in 2003), blogs, as in other parts of the world, where they appeared earlier and are subject of comprehensive research, are mostly represented by personal diaries, hosted by the Livejournal platform (popular in Russian-speaking countries), meant to be read by close friends and widely used for online communication. There are about 16,000 Livejournals registered in Kazakhstan, 6,000 of them based in Almaty (the number of people actually maintaining diaries is not confirmed).* Only some blogs discuss politics and offer analysis of news and events. Could these diaries become subject to information and media laws? In my opinion, yes, and if so, this is not a good development for Kazakhstan.

Sergey Vlasenko, media specialist at the American Bar Accociation (???/CEELI), who spoke at an Almaty conference on blogging, said that as far as the Government is concerned, all information online can be regarded as information provided by media, be it a website, an online journal, or a blog. A site is thus subject to Kazak law if it is registered under a Kazakh domain, if the person who writes there is situated in Kazakhstan, or is a Kazakhstan citizen. However, different variations are possible, and it is not quite clear how the decisions are made and which criteria are more important in judging whether the site is subject to Kazakh law or not. As for blogs, it’s even less clear as most hosting platforms are registered in the United States, or Europe and bloggers are more difficult to identify.

To prove how inconsistent the state can be towards online journalists, see the case of Kazis Togubaev, a controversial persona, writing on KUB, site registered in New York, the United States, where anyone can submit an article. Togubaev somewhat proudly told me when I met him in Almaty that he has four criminal cases pending, all at different stages, but all on article 318 of the Criminal Code. At that, the Prosecutor is concerned with applying paragraph two of the article, which provides for tougher measures and is relevant only for the media. On the other hand, www.kompromat.kz, a site with a slanderous dossier for every Kazakh public figure, which is quite comparable to Togubaev’s output, is not getting into any trouble. Either some people are more equal than others, to paraphrase Orwell, or there is no real policy on these issues.

No matter what, Kazakhstan still has the biggest community of bloggers in Central Asia, which is also the least censored. Kazis Togubaev, as much as he is pressured, is still able to post material on his court case and continue practising journalism, which I would not imagine happening in some neighboring countries. I am quite sure “blogs” were not on the agenda of the talk between Nazarbaev and Yertysbaev, but who knows how things might change when they find out about easier ways of publishing information that is not so welcome.

*See comments for correct statistics.