Floribert Chebeya: a victim of the global crackdown on human rights defenders

The optimism prompted by the Arab awakening should not blind us to the resilience of authoritarian regimes and the intimidating, precarious circumstances in which democracy advocates and human rights defenders continue to work. Just as democrats worldwide are drawing inspiration from the Arab spring, autocratic regimes are also taking note.

“Authoritarian governments … have already started acting preemptively in the hope of avoiding similar mass-scale protests,” according to a new report from Front Line, the watchdog for human rights defenders. A case in point is Zimbabwe, where dozens of activists have been rounded up, some for the ‘crime’ of watching TV footage of the Arab unrest.

“Elections are often a moment of increased vulnerability” for human rights defenders and journalists, the report notes, citing deteriorating conditions following recent elections in Bahrain, Belarus, Burundi, Côte d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, Kyrgyzstan, Sudan, and Ukraine.

While 2010 marked the 50th anniversary of independence for many African States, “the official rhetoric and festive climate were in stark contrast to the morale of civil society” in much of Africa, Frontline notes, including the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which lost Floribert Chebeya (above), one of the continent’s most prominent human rights defenders.

Harassment was on the increase in Zimbabwe, particularly in the first half of 2010, as several NGOs saw their members harassed, intimidated, detained, and prosecuted.

Farai Maguwu (left) from the Mutare Centre for Research and Development was put on trial for documenting the military’s collusion in illegal mining operations. The persecution of activists continued despite the presence of the Movement for Democratic Change in the coalition government.

“So long as political prisoners remain incarcerated and security service chiefs openly disdain the Prime Minister, the government of national unity remains one in name only,” Tyanai Masiya, chairman of the Mutare-based CRD, told the National Endowment for Democracy.

“LGBTI rights continued to be a risky endeavor in many countries, including DRC, Kenya, Malawi, Rwanda, Uganda and Zimbabwe,” the report notes, citing the murder of David Kato, a prominent human rights defender in Uganda.

In Latin America, labor union leaders, indigenous and afrodescendents, campesinos, community leaders, judges and lawyers, journalists and women activists are “particularly exposed to great risk,” the report notes.

China experienced an “unprecedented” crackdown in the wake of the Nobel Peace Prize award to Liu Xiaobo, as scores of human rights defenders were disappeared, placed under house arrest, prevented from leaving the country or heavily monitored.

Eastern Europe and Central Asia also witnessed a deteriorating situation in 2010, marked by “direct targeting” of human rights defenders in a number of countries, including Belarus, Kyrgyzstan, the Russian Federation, and Ukraine. Evgeniy Zhovtis, a leading figure in the region’s human rights movement and director of the Kazakhstan International Bureau for Human Rights and the Rule of Law, remains in jail despite international pressure for his release.

Several of the activists and groups cited in the report, including Floribert Chebeya’s Voix des sans Voix human rights group, Evgeniy Zhovtis’s Kazakhstan International Bureau and the Mutare Centre for Research and Development are supported by the National Endowment for Democracy.

Twenty years after seceding from the Soviet Union, Kazakhstan is now a beacon of democracy and stability, claims Erlan Idrissov, the country’s ambassador to Washington:

As an obvious achievement in this on-going quest for democratization, Kazakhstan served last year as chairman of the world’s premier election monitoring group, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe. Kazakhstan was widely commended for its leadership of OSCE, including by the U.S. If that’s not an indicator that Kazakhstan is serious about democratic governance and human rights, I don’t know what is.

Yevgeny Zhovtis would have something to say about such curious claims – if he was a free man.

The director of Kazakhstan’s Bureau for Human Rights and Rule of Law, a grantee of the National Endowment for Democracy, Zhovtis was sentenced to four-years in prison following a car accident in which a man was killed. Independent observers insist the prosecution was politically-motivated and the legal proceedings seriously flawed.

As for US endorsement of Kazakhstan’s democratic credentials, at the recent OSCE summit in Astana, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pointedly declined to endorse the view that the host country was a “modern, confident state which is open and democratic.”

“There is still much more work to done, there are many issues which are still not satisfying the people on the human rights regime and on democracy development,” she told the meeting.

“Empowering civil society is key to the future of this region and the OSCE,” she told the summit, calling on member states to “recognize civil society as a partner that challenges our governments to do better.”

Similarly, Thomas O. Melia, the U.S. deputy assistant secretary of state, criticized the stifling of independent media and the “variety of constraints on civil society in the former Soviet Union,” highlighting the case of jailed democracy advocate Zhovtis.

The WikiLeaks cables illustrate the difference between democrats and dictators, citing a U.S. Embassy official’s lengthy 2008 account of Kazakh leaders’  “endemic corruption,” penchant for heavy drinking” and other extravagant behavior:

Prime Minister Karim K. Masimov is described as arriving at 11:30 p.m. at Chocolat, one of the trendiest nightclubs in the capital, Astana. As other members of his group got up to dance, Mr. Masimov was spotted by American officials dancing alone on a stage overlooking the floor. Another senior Kazakh official, the cable said, “appears to enjoy loosening up in the tried and true ‘homo Sovieticus’ style — i.e. drinking oneself into a stupor.”

Central Asia has been a key site of the authoritarian backlash against democracy assistance, targeting dissidents, human rights groups and NGOs that receive foreign funding, as detailed in the World Movement for Democracy’s report on Defending Civil Society.

Sonia Zilberman of CIVICUS and Thomas O.Melia, deputy assistant secretary of state, review the civil society conference recommendations

As U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton departs for Central Asia, democracy advocates are warning that the region’s authoritarian regimes are cracking down on dissent and independent media.

But the recent release of Azerbaijan’s celebrated donkey bloggers suggests that a combination of diplomatic pressure, imaginative campaigning and international solidarity can yield results, regional activists heard today.

Clinton’s first stop is the summit of the 56-nation Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and a meeting with the conference host and current OSCE chair, Kazakhstan’s President Nursultan Nazarbayev.

The former Communist apparatchik has ruled unchallenged since the country was still a Soviet republic. He recently had himself declared “leader of the nation”, allowing him to maintain control even after formally leaving office.

Participants of a Parallel OSCE Civil Society Conference held in Astana urged OSCE members to strengthen field missions’ authority and authorize the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights to report on freedom of assembly, association and movement in Central Asia to the OSCE Permanent Council.

“Shrinking space for civil society to operate freely,” the erosion of human rights, and the inability of OSCE member states to resolve protracted conflicts, notably Nagorno Karabakh, all point to the need for the OSCE “to adapt and respond to new challenges,” the conference agreed.

Thomas O. Melia, the U.S. deputy assistant secretary of state, affirmed Washington’s support for bolstering ODIHR, the OSCE agency responsible for fostering democratic institutional development.

He criticized the stifling of independent media and the “variety of constraints on civil society in the former Soviet Union,” highlighting the case of jailed Kazakh democracy advocate Yevgeny Zhovtis, and called on Kazakhstan to move forward on its national human rights action plan.

“Yevgeny Zhovtis was part of that process,” he noted.

The director of Kazakhstan’s Bureau for Human Rights and Rule of Law, a grantee of the National Endowment for Democracy, Zhovtis was sentenced to four years in prison for accidentally striking and killing a man with his car. Independent observers consider the prosecution to be politically-motivated and the legal proceedings deeply flawed.

More than a hundred democracy, human rights and civil society activists attended the parallel meeting although many were either delayed or had flights cancelled. An audio statement from Zhovtis in his prison cell was broadcast to the meeting, which also saw a video message of solidarity from veteran Russian dissident Lyudmila Alexeyeva.

The activists called for the release of political prisoners in OSCE member states and demanded mechanisms to ensure that that civil society is officially and meaningfully integrated into OSCE decision-making.

The Helsinki process had demonstrated that protecting fundamental freedoms is critical to maintaining security, the conference concluded. OSCE field offices should be more transparent and cooperate with civil society, while field office staff should have at least some expertise in human rights.

It was the small actions of many that led to the Azerbaijani bloggers‘ release, said Hikmet Hajizade, father of Adnan Hajizada and head of the Baku-based FAR Center for Political and Economic Research. He called for improvements to the OSCE’s monitoring of elections and human rights across the region – capacities which Russia and other authoritarian member states have tried to undermine.

Conference participants included a range of government-organized NGOs as well as genuinely independent civil society groups.

“Like any civil society we heard a variety of point of views,’ said Melia, referring to the many GONGOs in evidence.

But he also defended the right of NGOs to receive foreign funding and dismissed the suggestion that they were thereby politically compromised or acting as conduits for foreign interference in domestic affairs.

“I wouldn’t judge an organization on its funding but on the work they do,” he said.

Russia has led the region’s authoritarian backlash against democracy assistance, targeting NGOs that receive foreign funding, as detailed in the World Movement for Democracy’s report on Defending Civil Society.

Kazakhstan assumed its controversial one-year chairmanship of the OSCE at the start of this year and democracy advocates complain that the first former Soviet state to chair the grouping is using its tenure to legitimize its “soft authoritarianism.”

The regime is consciously fashioning a form of authoritarian rule that is neither as repressive nor as potentially brittle as its neighbors, analysts suggest.

“Nazarbaev looked very, very closely at these other regimes. He’s tracked very closely both what’s happened in Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan,” says Columbia University’s Scott Horton, a legal expert on Kazakhstan.

“He is very, very careful to ensure that his government and the way he rules is always several steps shy of theirs. It’s never as brutal, never as authoritarian; it consistently gives more rights to the people than they do,” he recently told RFE/RL.

A group of leading democracy advocates today signed an open letter asking Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to urge Kazakhstan’s leaders to free human rights activist Yevgeniy Zhovtis from imprisonment.

Zhovtis, director of the Bureau for Human Rights and Rule of Law, a grantee of the National Endowment for Democracy, was sentenced to four years in prison for accidentally striking and killing a man with his car. Legal observers and human rights groups found the prosecution to be politically-motivated and the judicial proceedings deeply flawed

One year on from his conviction, he has been the victim of arbitrary treatment by prison authorities, the letter notes, concluding with a request to the Secretary of State:

We understand that you will join the leaders from other OSCE participating states at a summit meeting in Astana in early December in this, the thirty-fifth anniversary year of the Helsinki Final Act. Prior to that, encourage you and other senior U.S. officials to take every opportunity, including President Nazarbayev’s upcoming visit to New York for this year’s session of the UN General Assembly, to urge your Kazakhstani counterparts to secure Mr. Zhovtis’ release.

The appeal is signed by The Rt. Hon. Kim Campbell, Member (Canada) and Chair, Steering Committee, World Movement for Democracy; Stephen Rickard, Washington Director, Open Society Institute; Robert Herman, Director of Programs, Freedom House; Rachel Denber, Acting Director, Europe and Central Asia Division, Human Rights Watch; Paul LeGendre, Director, Fighting Discrimination Program, Human Rights First; Ellen Bork, Director, Democracy and Human Rights, Foreign Policy Initiative; and David J. Kramer, Senior Transatlantic Fellow, German Marshall Fund.

Democracy advocates and politicians are demanding the release of human rights activist Yevgeniy Zhovtis.

Leading politicians are joining with democracy and civil society groups in calling on authorities in Kazakhstan to release jailed human rights activist Yevgeny Zhovtis.

His case was raised on Capitol Hill today at a hearing on Kazakhstan’s controversial leadership of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) featuring the country’s Foreign Minister Kanat Saudabayev.

The Steering Committee of the World Movement for Democracy called on the Supreme Court of Kazakhstan to honor the appeal submitted on 27 January 2010 by Zhovtis’s defense team. The human rights activist is a member of the movement’s Steering Committee and director of the Bureau for Human Rights and Rule of Law, a grantee of the National Endowment for Democracy.

Zhovtis was sentenced to four years in prison for accidentally striking and killing a man with his car.

“It is now clear that Kazakhstani authorities exploited this unfortunate accident to politicize the investigation and punish Mr. Zhovtis for his human rights work, evidenced by the fact that the investigation and the subsequent trial were rife with procedural violations,” the World Movement states.

Senators John Kerry (D-Mass), Robert Casey (D-Penn) and Benjamin Cardin (D-Maryland) expressed their concern “that Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and Freedom House, as well as Kazakh rights organizations, have raised questions about the investigation and trial that led to this verdict and allege that Mr. Zhovtis did not have the opportunity to exercise fully his right to defend himself.”

The Open Society Institute urged the Almaty authorities to release Zhovtis and order a fresh investigation into the case.

“Zhovtis is one of Kazakhstan’s most dedicated human rights lawyers, and we are deeply disturbed that he has been imprisoned after an unfair trial,” said James A. Goldston, executive director of the Open Society Justice Initiative.

“With Kazakhstan chairing the Organisation for Cooperation and Security in Europe this year, it needs to show that it respects basic standards of law and justice.”

At the Capitol Hill hearing, Sen. Benjamin L. Cardin (D-MD) expressed his support for Kazakhstan, which presents itself as an emerging democracy, hosting a summit of OSCE heads of state this year provided the regime adhered to the grouping’s practice, including a “full review of OSCE commitments open to non-governmental organization participation”.

But he cited the country’s restrictive media law, poor electoral practice, and the detention of Zhovtis as “serious matters” to be confronted.

The hearing reflected Washington’s ambivalence towards the regime in Kazakhstan. As Eurasianet’s Joshua Kucera notes:

The problem is that different constituencies within the US government disagree on what Washington’s top priority should be: while some argue that the United States should push for Astana to adopt a faster democratization pace, others are seeking greater cooperation on security issues, in particular Kazakhstani assistance in shipping military equipment to Afghanistan.

“When they come in talking about an OSCE summit, we, and a lot of the OSCE members, are telling them the same thing: we want to see [democratization] progress,” one State Department official told EurasiaNet.

Kazakhstan’s OSCE chairmanship could set a disturbing precedent and example for the region, activists and analysts suggest.

“What the former Soviet space needs are positive examples for liberalization, but too often, the exact opposite trajectory is seen in practice,” writes Vyacheslav Abramov, an activist for media freedom in Kazakhstan, and head of MediaNet, a non-profit that provides training in investigative journalism:

Throughout the region, both human rights activists and international organizations monitoring human freedom around the world have experience similar repression. Often, states borrow tactics from one another, as is evidenced by the passage of similar measures to restrict speech, assembly, and electoral rights in Russia, Kyrgyzstan and Azerbaijan. Should the Kazakhs be successful in their goal of holding the first OSCE summit in a decade, what message will that send to all the member states headed unequivocally in the wrong direction.

The Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe risks losing its democratic character, an imprisoned human rights activist warned today, as the head of the US delegation to the organization’s Warsaw meeting said that engagement remains the best way to deal with autocratic regimes.

The OSCE is one of the few international organizations that proclaims the human dimension of “democracy, rule of law and human rights” to be as important as economic cooperation and security, said Yevgeniy Zhovtis, director of the Kazakhstan International Bureau for Human Rights and Rule of Law, a grantee of the National Endowment for Democracy. But anti-democratic backsliding within its Eurasian members is threatening to unravel the “Third Basket” of OSCE obligations.

A Kazakh court this month sentenced Zhovtis, a member of the steering committee of the World Movement for Democracy, to four years in prison for manslaughter following an accident in which the car he was driving struck and killed a man. Human rights and democracy watchdogs insist that the trial was politically motivated.

Unless the OSCE’s semi-authoritarian members like Kazakhstan, which has assumed the OSCE chair, take “clear, visible, and tangible steps in the direction of democratic development,” Zhovtis warned, the OSCE will come to resemble the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.

An international outcry is brewing after a Kazakhstan court today sentenced a leading democracy and human rights activist to four years in prison for manslaughter. Yevgeniy Zhovtis, founding director of the Kazakhstan International Bureau for Human Rights and Rule of Law, was charged with manslaughter after he was involved in a car accident on 26 July in which a pedestrian was killed. 

Fellow human rights activist Andrei Sviridov told Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty that Zhovtis, a member of the World Movement for Democracy’s steering committee, said after the verdict that the trial was a “political punishment.”  

The state of human rights in Kazakhstan has been under growing scrutiny as it prepares to assume the rotating chairmanship of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe in 2010. Earlier this summer, Zhovtis told OSCE officials in Vienna that Kazakhstan has not yet complied with human rights standards it accepted as a condition of leading the OSCE.

“We find ourselves in a situation in which Kazakhstan could be taking over the chairmanship of the OSCE just months after illegally jailing its leading (and frankly, one of its last) human rights defenders,” writes human rights lawyer Robert Amsterdam. “If that’s not an embarrassing irony of poor decision-making for this prestigious international organization, I don’t know what is.”

Human rights and democracy insists the prosecution is an attempt to silence Zhovtis and disrupt the work of his organization, a grantee of the National Endowment for Democracy. In a recent interview, Zhovtis said that although better than other Central Asian like Turkmenistan or Uzbekistan, the country’s human rights situation was “deteriorating”.

An International Committee in support of Zhovtis has been established, comprising prominent regional human rights activists, including Inessa Gezelle Meerburg of Kazakhstan, Andrey Aranbaev of Turkmenistan, and Russia’s Vitaliy Ponomarev and Yuri Dzhibladze. The committee released a statement in which it insists that Zhovtis is being politically persecuted. 

The biased character of the investigation and disappointing start of the trial testify not only about a disregard to the law but most likely also about a political order from above. Apparently, some influential forces strive, at any price, including juggling with the facts and open violations of the law, to secure conviction of Evgeny Zhovtis, discredit and silence a well known lawyer and human rights defender who has been for many years successfully protecting public interests and openly speaking up about serious human rights violations in Kazakhstan.”

Some suggest that the prosecution has been pushed by mid-level officials and that the government may be embarrassed by as it prepares to assume the OSCE chair. “[The order] is not from the very top,” said one observer. “It is probably the leaders of law-enforcement bodies whose lives Zhovtis has spoiled and who have decided to take revenge.”

Yevgeny Zhovtis, Kazakh human rights and democracy activist

Democracy and human rights activists are calling on the government in Kazakhstan to drop unfair charges brought against Yevgeniy Zhovtis, founding director of the Kazakhstan International Bureau for Human Rights and Rule of Law, a grantee of the National Endowment for Democracy.

Zhovtis, a member of the World Movement for Democracy’s steering committee, has been charged with manslaughter and violating the traffic code after he was involved in a car accident on 26 July in which a pedestrian was killed. If convicted, he would face up to five years in prison.

Reports suggest that the authorities are exploiting a tragic accident to politicize the investigation and pressurize Zhovtis, a forceful critic of the government’s human rights record. “The government’s past harassment of its critics and its handling of the case thus far raise concerns that it could be used for political purposes,” said Human Rights Watch.

The World Movement for Democracy cites several procedural violations in the case:

Mr. Zhovtis was never informed that he was a defendant, and thus was never able to use his rights as a defendant to file motions on his own behalf.  The complaints he has filed remain unanswered.  Most recently on 27 August 2009, Judge Kulan Tolkunov charged Mr. Zhovtis with manslaughter, despite the fact that the prosecution’s forensic analysis found that he was neither intoxicated nor driving above the speed limit at the time of the accident.

“The rule of law should prevail over the desire to silence the voice of a leading human rights defender,” the World Movement statement insists.

The state of human rights in Kazakhstan is under growing scrutiny as the country prepares to assume the rotating chairmanship of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe in 2010.