A court in Kyrgyzstan has upheld a government order to shut down the local affiliate of U.S. government-funded broadcaster RFE/RL, dealing another blow to critical media in the country.
The judge of the Leninsky district court in Bishkek ruled on April 27 that Radio Azattyk had violated the law in its coverage of a border conflict between Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan that occurred last year.
The government claimed that a video report produced by Azattyk “promoted conflict, violence, and ethnic intolerance.” Officials took issue with a passage in the report that cited Tajik claims that Kyrgyzstan instigated the hostilities.
Marie Struthers, Amnesty International’s director for Eastern Europe and Central Asia, called the court’s actions a “major blow to freedom of expression in the country.”
“The allegation made by the Kyrgyzstani authorities, that a video published by Radio Azattyk propagated hatred, is not only false but a manifest pretense. The authorities have been seeking any excuse to shut down an independent media voice,” Struthers said in a statement.
Azattyk’s lawyer, Timur Sultanov, said that the court’s decision reflected the state of freedom of speech in Kyrgyzstan.
“The court was supposed to determine whether citizens have the right to receive and disseminate reliable information or whether this right is simply words written in the constitution. Today’s ruling has provided an answer to this question,” Sultanov said.
The lawyer added that Azattyk planned to appeal.
This development has been a long time coming. In late October, the Culture Ministry ordered a two-month block of the outlet’s website and froze its local bank account as a sanction for what it claimed was the dissemination of false information about violence on the Tajik border the previous month. Azattyk’s website was also inaccessible at that time.
In January, the government ordered the closure of Azattyk and filed a suit to obtain a court sanction for the move. The success of its legal bid can be attributed, in part, to the much-criticized Law on Protection from False Information adopted in August 2021. The loose terms of that legislation in effect allow blocking access to a resource if it relays the remarks of a person perceived to be making an assertion deemed false – a Tajik official in this instance.
Despite concerted lobbying from U.S. lawmakers, Kyrgyz authorities have maintained their campaign of pressure against Azattyk, whose multiple investigative reports into corruption among officials have made it a prime target for reprisals. Following the Culture Ministry’s initial salvo against the broadcaster, Senators Bob Menendez and Jim Risch appealed to President Sadyr Japarov in a January letter, asking the government to refrain from jeopardizing Kyrgyzstan’s “international reputation as a beacon of free speech in Central Asia.”
Japarov’s office has dismissed such petitions and claimed that the courts were merely upholding the law.
Source : Eurasianet