In authoritarian Kazakhstan, civil society representatives are subjected to arbitrary detention, criminal prosecution, imprisonment and torture for public and human rights activities, participation in peaceful protests and criticism of the authorities through social networks.
The Open Dialogue Foundation has managed to gather the names of 136 police officers, investigators, security officers, prosecutors and judges who participated in politically motivated prosecutions of peaceful protesters.
On 6 July 2019, rallies were planned in various cities of Kazakhstan to demand that the results of the presidential election be cancelled and Nazarbayev be deprived of power, as well as against Chinese expansion. Law enforcement agencies detained about 700 peaceful protesters in different places.
Nazarbayev’s protege Kasym-Zhomart Tokayev expectedly won the presidential elections in Kazakhstan. The elections were fully controlled and constituted merely an imitation of the electoral process. A lack of trust in the election results is not only due to the lack of legislative conditions for fair
In February 2019, mass peaceful protests, unprecedented in their scale and nature of demands, were held in different regions of Kazakhstan. Protesters complained of poverty and corruption, demanding reforms, improvement of social security and the resignation of the President.
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.
