AUG. 22 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – In a boost for Georgia’s chances of joining NATO, or at least making serious progress towards joining, US vice-president Joe Biden said that he supported the Georgian ambition of joining the Western military alliance, media reported. NATO is due to meet for its annual conference in September.
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(News report from Issue No. 197, published on Aug. 27 2014)
AUG. 26 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – Turkmenistan has signed another major gas supply deal, underlining its growing status as a regional energy super-power. A Turkish-Japanese consortium will build a $1.7b gas plant in Turkmenistan that will process natural gas into high quality fuel for export. Most of Turkmenistan’s natural gas it pumped to China.
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(News report from Issue No. 197, published on Aug. 27 2014)
AUG. 26 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – Two Tajiks — a civilian and a soldier — died in a shootout with Kyrgyz forces on the Tajikistan-Kyrgyzstan border, the most serious violence along the disputed boundary this year. The row between Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan threatens to destabilise the region.
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(News report from Issue No. 197, published on Aug. 27 2014)
AUG. 25 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – The rebel Georgian region of Abkhazia voted in Raul Khajimba as its new president. Bucking expectations, Mr Khajimba won the vote in the first round, providing Abkhazia and Russia, its patron, with a show of unity. Abkhazia declared independence from Georgia in 2008. Georgia described the vote as illegal.
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(News report from Issue No. 197, published on Aug. 27 2014)
AUG. 26 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – The US-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) said that another independent journalist has been beaten up in Azerbaijan. HRW said that several men attacked Ilgar Nasibov in his office in the Nakhchivan province. Mr Nasibov was left unconscious. HRW linked the attacked to Mr Nasibov’s anti-government stance.
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(News report from Issue No. 197, published on Aug. 27 2014)
AUG. 22 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – Halyk Bank, Kazakhstan’s second largest lender, increased its full year profit estimate by 10% to 100m tenge ($550m) after a strong first half of the year. The data is positive for Kazakhstan’s banking sector which is looking to rebound from the Global Financial Crisis.
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(News report from Issue No. 197, published on Aug. 27 2014)
AUG. 24 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – Human rights groups have criticised former British PM Tony Blair for penning a letter in 2012 to Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev giving him advice on how to refer in a speech to deadly clashes between police and anti- government demonstrators. Mr Blair has been an adviser to Mr Nazarbayev since 2011.
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(News report from Issue No. 197, published on Aug. 27 2014)
AUG. 25 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – For human rights workers and freedom of speech activists, these are increasingly worrying times in Kyrgyzstan.
Once considered a bastion of political and social pluralism, Kyrgyzstan appears to be retarding. Earlier this year politicians prepared the ground to implement harsh anti-gay laws, now reports have emerged that say the intelligence services are prosecuting two journalists for alleged defamation.
Eurasianet reported that Kyrgyzstan’s State Committee for National Security (GKNB) has demanded damages of nearly $20,000 from Shorukh Saipov, a journalist who writes for the independent Fergana News website.
In an article in May, Mr Saipov said that the GKNB was extorting money from Muslims by threatening to prosecute them for extremism. The GKNB has said that the article deliberately tried to tarnish its reputation, charges that Fergana News has denied.
Highlighting the pressure on the media in Kyrgyzstan, Mr Saipov’s brother, also a journalist, was murdered in the southern city of Osh in 2007. His killers were never found.
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(News report from Issue No. 197, published on Aug. 27 2014)
AUG. 22 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – Perhaps trying to woo Kyrgyzstan into the embrace of the Customs Union, Russia agreed to lift restrictions on the import of Kyrgyz agriculture products, media reported. The restrictions were imposed over food safety fears. Kyrgyzstan has applied to join the Russia-led Customs Union later this year.
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(News report from Issue No. 197, published on Aug. 27 2014)
SEPT. 17 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) – Georgia has delayed by two years the roll out nationwide of juries in trials.
In 2010, Tbilisi became the first city in former Soviet Caucasus or Central Asia to allow jury verdicts in some trials. Initially, jury trials were limited to those in which both the prosecution and defence in murder cases agreed to it. The former Soviet Union has no legacy of jury trials and their introduction was considered a great modernising step by the administration of former President Mikheil Saakashvili.
Of course introducing jury trials suited Mr Saakashvili’s vision of where Georgia was heading. Mr Saakashvili was an arch-Western reformer. He saw Georgia’s future with the European Union, the United States and NATO. Introducing jury trials was another step in this direction.
The experiment was deemed a success and rolled out to courts in Georgia’s second city of Kutaisi. There have, reports said, been eight murder cases involving juries.
And lawmakers had put forward ambitious plans to push jury trials out across the country not only for murder cases but all crimes that involve a prison sentence from Oct. 1 2014. This has now been delayed.
Poor court infrastructure, a lack of understanding on how juries operate and the extra cost and time of running jury trials were the reasons behind the delay, the civil.ge new website reported quoted the Georgian ministry of justice as saying.
Still, the ambitious plan has only been delayed for two years, rather than scrapped altogether.
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(News report from Issue No. 201, published on Sept. 24 2014)
