Kazakh Foreign Minister Kanat Saudabayev makes a rather bizarre attempt to justify the incarceration of human rights activist Yevgeny Zhovtis, comparing his case to that of celebrated film director Roman Polanski.
Zhovtis was sentenced to four years in prison for accidentally striking and killing a man with his car.
“I don’t even want to comment on this issue,” he said. “Switzerland, for example, is not extraditing Mr. Polanksi — but that is not being discussed at such levels.”
The Zhovtis issue dogged Saudabayev during his trip to Washington and has tainted Kazakhstan’s controversial accession to the rotating chairmanship of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), the continent’s leading human rights watchdog.
Democracy advocates and U.S. Senators used the occasion of his visit to call on the Kazahk authorities to release Zhovtis, the director of the Bureau for Human Rights and Rule of Law, a grantee of the National Endowment for Democracy.
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.
“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,” said a World Movement statement.
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