OCT. 29 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Prosecutors in Georgia have opened an investigation into recordings of phone conversations that allegedly showed former president Mikheil Saakashvili discussing a potential revolution in Georgia. Mr Saakashvili is currently serving in Ukraine as the governor of Odessa.
ENDS
Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 254, published on Oct. 30 2015)
OCT. 28 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) — Britain’s High Court decline an appeal by Maksat Arip and Baglan Zhunus, two former directors of Kazakh paper manufacturer Kagazy, against freezing their assets. Kagazy has accused Mr Arip and Mr Zhunus of misappropriating company funds in connection with Kagazy’s 2007 IPO in London and filed a $280m lawsuit. The trial will begin in April 2017.
ENDS
Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 254, published on Oct. 30 2015)
OCT. 21 2015, ASTANA (The Conway Bulletin) — International human rights groups criticised Kazakhstan’s draft bill on NGOs as an attempt to seriously restrict civil society’s activities.
The new bill would hand the government control of foreign grants and also restrict the operational sphere of NGOs.
Dunja Mijatovic, OSCE representative on freedom of the media, said: “Introducing legislation that would put NGOs under strict governmental supervision, including the control of foreign grants, is worrying for civil society actors in general”.
The OSCE is Europe’s intergovernmental democracy watchdog.
The government has said that it needs clearer oversight over how NGOs operate in the country. Its detractors, though, have said it is far too similar to a bill introduced by Russia a few years ago.
Gulmira Birzhanova, a lawyer and expert in national and international media law, who works in the Legal Media Center NGO in Astana, said the bill contradicted basic constitutional rights.
“The proposed legislation violates freedom of assembly as stated in our Constitution,” Ms Birzhanova told the Bulletin in an interview.
Under the new law, the ministry of culture and sports will be in charge of assigning funds, which Ms Birzhanova said would hand it the ultimate control over NGOs’ operations.
“The ministry will act as a central operator that will distribute finances and grants to NGOs no matter if they receive it from the governmental budget or from international sources,” she said. “This creates a thorny situation because NGOs are often engaged in disputes against the government.”
Analysts have said that despite the criticism of the bill, the Kazakh parliament may be looking to turn it into law by the end of the year.
ENDS
Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 253, published on Oct. 23 2015)
OCT. 22 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – A court in Almaty shut the Adam newspaper, saying that, by publishing in Russian only, it violated the law on languages. Human rights groups said this was a pretext to curb independent media in Kazakhstan. A paper linked to the opposition, Adam was created in March 2015 after its predecessor Adam Bol was shut down in December 2014.
ENDS
Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 253, published on Oct. 23 2015)
OCT. 23 2015, TBILISI (The Conway Bulletin) — A court in Tbilisi acquitted four men of organising a violent attack on a gay rights march in 2013 that injured 28 people, pitting Georgia’s pro-rights lobby against a strong traditionalist group.
The four men, including one priest who was photographed carrying a wooden stool at the 2013 march apparently as a weapon, were accused of being the ringleaders behind the homophobic attack in central Tbilisi.
Human rights groups have accused Georgia of homophobia in the past but traditional values hold sway – the Church is still very powerful and has spoken out strongly against gay rights, – and the court’s verdict will have resonated with many people.
One user on the kavpolit.com website said: “Gay parades are not for the Caucasus. Well done to the priests and the judges. Let them go to Western Europe.”
In 2014, a poll in Georgia found that only 24% of people thought that protecting gay rights was important.
ENDS
Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 253, published on Oct. 23 2015)
OCT. 15 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – In a landmark ruling that will irritate the Armenian government, the European Court of Human Rights (ECRH) decreed that Dogu Perincek, chairman of Turkey’s Patriotic Party, should never have been convicted in 2007 by a Swiss court for denying an alleged genocide by Ottoman Turks of thousands of Armenians in 1915. The ECRH said the conviction was an infringement of Mr Perincek’s free speech. Armenia has been campaigning for denial of the genocide to be a crime.
ENDS
Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 253, published on Oct.16 2015)
OCT. 15 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – A bill under review by Kazakhstan’s parliament threatens the independence of NGOs in the country, the UN said. The bill is being likened to a law in Russia which cut NGOs’ ability to receive funding from overseas. If the law is passed, the Kazakh government will control funding to all civil society groups.
ENDS
Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 253, published on Oct.16 2015)
OCT. 7 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Human Rights activists in Kazakhstan have asked President Nursultan Nazarbayev to veto a bill being reviewed by the Senate which will make it harder for domestic NGOs to receive funding from overseas. Campaigners said the bill is a form of state control over NGOs.
ENDS
Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 251, published on Oct. 9 2015)
OCT. 6 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – The Armenian government approved a second draft of a new tax code that it hopes will pull in extra revenue and cut its deficit. At its core, media reported that the tax code will target closing tax benefits.
ENDS
Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 251, published on Oct. 9 2015)
OCT. 5 2015, TBILISI (The Conway Bulletin) — Signalling that a regional economic crisis is worse than it had thought, the Georgian finance ministry said it would scrap a flagship policy that would have cut corporation tax and encouraged business growth.
The Georgian Dream government said earlier this year that it wanted to copy an Estonian tax policy that scrapped corporation tax on profit re-invested into businesses in order to generate more growth. The downside was that, in the short term at least, tax receipts would also drop.
And now, at a meeting to discuss the government’s proposed budget for 2016, deputy finance minister Giorgi Kakauridze said that plans to introduce the tax cuts this year had been pushed back indefinitely.
“This is quite a difficult process, fraught with quite a lot of risk,” media quoted Mr Kvirikashvili as saying. “Yes this [model] has its positive sides, but there are lots of negative aspects as well, so it has to be thoroughly considered. No final decision has been made in which direction this reform will go.”
The bottom line is that Georgia’s budget relies heavily on corporation tax. To cut this tax now, with the economy worsening, would be fool- hardy, the government appears to have decided.
Analysts, though, were scathing and said the tax reform should never have been discussed in the first place.
“It is not the first time Georgian Dream has promised changes they’re unable to keep. They should have known that the economic crisis would make this reform a bad idea.” said Giorgi Aptsiauri, economist at the Georgian Institute of Politics. “Income from corporation tax is a large part of the budget. They can not afford a cut in revenue with the current economic situation.”
ENDS
Copyright ©The Conway Bulletin — all rights reserved
(News report from Issue No. 251, published on Oct. 9 2015)
