Tag: DCK

On 10 May 2018, in Kazakhstan, the police dispersed peaceful protesters with the use of brute force. Participants in the protests were striving to draw the attention of the delegation of the EP to the problem of political prisoners and the practice of torture in the country’s detention centres.

The Kazakhstani court has banned the activities of the new opposition movement ‘Democratic Choice of Kazakhstan’. The slightest support of the DCK has been penalised with prison terms.

1. Introduction In April 2017, opposition politician Mukhtar Ablyazov, along with his associates, announced the resumption of the activities of the ‘Democratic Choice of Kazakhstan’ (DCK) movement. The previous DCK movement was banned by a Kazakhstani court on charges of ‘extremism’ in 2005. According to Ablyazov, 32,000 people joined the DCK in 2007. In authoritarian […]

The Democratic Choice of Kazakhstan (DCK) was the largest opposition movement in Kazakhstan of the past 25 years. The story of the DCK serves as a perfect illustration of the core issues of the Kazakh authoritarian regime.

In the end of June 2015, the Open Dialogue Foundation published a report ’Harassment of civil society in Kazakhstan’. The Foundation’s analyst, Katerina Savchenko, provided answers to some clarifying questions in an interview with a journalist of the Radio Azattyq, Kazis Toguzbayev.

The story of KDC is an outstanding illustration to the very core issues of the Kazakhstan authoritarian regime, where all the power lies in the hands of a closed circle of decision makers with the President Nursultan Nazarbayev at the head