Kazakhstan’s parliament adopted on Thursday 19 November a controversial privacy bill which critics say will place even greater constraints on journalists’ ability to carry out investigative journalism. The bill gives authorities the power to shut down publications and jail journalists for alleged violation of privacy. The bill, which needs only President Nursultan Nazarbayev’s signature before […]

The International Press Institute (IPI) is disappointed at the failure on 13 August of Kazakhstan’s highest court to quash a prison sentence for a newspaper editor. The three-year sentence handed down to Kazakh Ramazan Yesergepov, editor-in-chief of Alma-ata Info, a small-circulation independent weekly newspaper, sparked worldwide condemnation and has cast a dark shadow over the […]

According to information provided to the International Press Institute (IPI), the pressure on the KTK television station and the Karavan weekly newspaper has increased in recent days with the authorities arresting two media executives and a journalist. On 25 May, the authorities arrested Ruslan Zhemkov and Adil Sharipov, the Executive Director and General Administrator of […]

In response to the events of yesterday in Kazakhstan, the Director of the International Press Institute (IPI), Johann P. Fritz, has issued a further statement about the silencing of the KTK and Karavan media organisations. “It now seems that the enforced closures of the media organisations were motivated by the desire of the authorities to […]