OSCE Unbound

Is the Summit Less than the Whole of Its Parts? Part 1

This poster recently appeared pasted on a street sign near the State Department in Washington, DC.

The run-up to the summit in Astana has been a debilitating and demoralizing process, and the diplomats and NGOs who stuck it out to the end to try to keep waving the Helsinki flag are to be commended. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton traveled to Astana and was scheduled to speak at an NGO event. All well and good.

Even so, participation in this entire distended fandago has come at a cost, and it has involved some erosion of our principles and some compromise, and a little bit of that frog-boiling-in-water syndrome that OSCE enterprises always seem to involve.

Some observers believe that the U.S., which has long had a cosy relationship with Kazakhstan for energy and geopolitical interests, sold out to Astana last spring when it was negotiating participation of Kazakhstan in the Northern Distribution Network that delivers non-lethal supplies to the troops in Afghanistan via Central Asia. In fact, the U.S. dragged out these negotiations for months, tried to do what it could -- and surprisingly, even deployed President Obama himself to publicly raise the case of jailed human rights leader Evgeny Zhovtis. It's not every day that you use up the chit of having the leader of the Western world raise a single case like that -- and not win it -- but in this case, losing was winning, because it only served to point up to the Kazakhs that Obama himself was willing to take up the rights of an individual, and it only highlighted the unacceptable obstructivism of Astana on the case.

Yet, in the end, the exigency of the NDN overflight needs, energy and trade concerns, and a fear of undermining an organization in which in fact Clinton had renewed U.S. engagement all conspired to create the less-than-moral concession to Astana to hold the summit. According to OSCE, only 38 of the 56 participating states sent their heads of state  -- and that's all to the good.

Next summit, in free Minsk in 2020?

Zhovtis was put away in jail on the eve of Kazakhstan's assuming the chair, and kept out of action so as not to influence it -- although he was able to smuggle out some statements and appeals (his last one noted that he had begun to be punished for doing so). It was Zhenya's idea to have Kazakhstan chair the OSCE in the first place, in the belief that it might shine a spotlight on human rights abuses and possibly serve as a spur to improve them.

It didn't.

Turning back on Live Journal hardly counts if one of the main opposition blogs on LJ is still blocked. As the OSCE rapporteur on media has protested, a journalist, Ramazan Esergepov, still remains in prison (his "state secrets" being nothing more than reporting on a criminal case that in a normal country would be open to reporting by the press). And on and on.

When I say our principles became somewhat tattered, I mean that we were forced to paper over the lack of human rights progress and the shocking negligence in responding to the pogroms in southern Kyrgyzstan in order to do business with people of ill will, and their GONGOs -- which was one of the most odious features of all these review conferences, spread in time and place over three cities in three months -- and I'm not sure, to the benefit of human rights.

The Turkmen human rights activists who have been coming to OSCE were jerked around, and while some were let in finally in Warsaw and Vienna, some were not, and ultimately none of them got visas for Astana. There was the blunt and thuggish message, regrettably tacitly conceded by being also relayed by Western diplomats, that "their safety could not be guaranteed," i.e. they might have to be extradited back to Turkmenistan on a trumped-up Interpol request from Ashgabat. Shame on them. The Turkmen dissidents have sent out an appeal. Chief among their points is that the OSCE office in Ashgabat has long since stopped trying to promote democracy and is merely simulating it -- if it were doing its job probably, I say, it would be kicked out. And that would be ok, as it could then decamp to Vienna and serve as the office-in-exile until such time as the government is willing to normalize.

The parallel summit -- oops, I mean the...parallel conference did in the end come off, with 177 participants, 59 of whom were from Kazakhstan, and an additional 11 of whom were ODIHR staff  (among the guests was -- I'm not kidding! -- Nina Belyayeva, the Russian lawyer and expert on associations (I'll say!) who was appearing in her capacity as an ODIHR expert on NGO law. She advocated that the police and NGOs work together).  Of course, quite a few out of the 59 from Kazakhstan and a certain number of others were GONGOs.

At least some of the worst OSCE problems were mentioned -- the killing of journalists, ideas for how to try to gain more solidarity, education, and action for threatened reporters, and the harassment and killing of human rights activists, and how to get better protection for them.

But it must be said: the NGOs compromised in having their meeting in Astana. In part, it was about the things that didn't get said that were "too big" -- the failure of OSCE even to land a police mission in Osh, the failure to cope with the violence in southern Kyrgyzstan, and the spillover and implications of the war in Afghanistan. To be sure, someone raised Askarov's case and at first got an unacceptable response....

I personally think it would have been more honourable to have the meeting outside of Kazakhstan, and on better terms -- without GONGOs and without Kazakh government officials taking up the scarce air time.

Kazakhstan Takes on Torture with OSCE -- Kind Of

A year ago, Zhovtis himself was speaking at conferences like this. (c) 2009 Kazakhstan International Bureau for Human Rights and the Rule of Law

A big OSCE meeting is getting underway about torture in Kazakhstan. I was among those who advocated this as a leading topic for the period of the Kazakh chair, but others thought topics like "transparency" or "media" or  "governance" or "tolerance" would "fly" better. Even so, it turns out that the government *can* handle the topic -- although in a fashion that runs a grave risk of becoming superficial and leading to the bureaucratization of a problem that in fact is a simpler matter. Dealing with torture doesn't so much require a committee as a change of heart and and a clear expression of will as a policy disseminated throughout the law-enforcement agencies that citizens have meaningful ways of checking.

I don't know how much NGOs were prepared for this meeting, but I see Penal Reform International is taking part. I'll tell you my thoughts on all this, however -- it's all kind of top-heavy, and the pedal hasn't hit the medal yet:

The event brings together some 80 participants, including officials of Kazakhstan's Presidential Administration, the Parliament and the Ministries of Justice, Internal Affairs, Education, Defence, Labour and Health. Representatives from the Committee of National Security, the Prosecutor General's Office, the Commission on Human Rights, the Supreme Court, the Constitutional Council, academia and human rights defenders are also taking part.

The subject isn't torture cases or reports per say, but the optional protocol to the UN Convention Against Torture, and "the draft law developed by the Justice Ministry on establishing public control in places of detention through a national preventive mechanism (NPM), as stipulated by the OPCAT," which Kazakhstan ratified in October 2008.

"Control" is one of those translator's false friends that is better translated as "oversight," since the public will not be actually controlling, i.e. managing through democratically elected representatives and an independent judiciary, these places of detention. Even so, it's all part of the slow but steady building up of institutions that can tackle the deep problem of torture in Kazakhstan, which follows the same patterns long ago laid down by the Soviet state-sponsored torture system of the GULAG.

It helps in these endeavours to keep your eye on the ball, and not to get too distracted by a) the fabulousness of the fact that Kazakhstan has signed the optional protocol in theory enabling citizens to file complaints or b) that it is willing to have an OSCE conference on this subject or c) that a draft law is being discussed.

Because, well, there's still the torture. It's helpful to read the Committee Against Torture's latest conclusions on Kazakhstan and the various alternative reports also submitted by NGOs. The CAT says:

Detention and places of deprivation of liberty

21.    The Committee welcomes the successful reform of much of the Kazakh penitentiary system through the adoption of programmes conducted in close cooperation with international and national organizations as well as the enactment of new laws and regulations. It further notes that this reform resulted in a decrease of the rate of pre-trial detention, an increased use of alternative sanctions to imprisonment, more humane conditions of detention, and a marked improvement in the conditions of detention in post-conviction detention facilities. However, the Committee remains concerned at:

(a)    The deterioration of prison conditions and stagnation in the implementation of penal reforms since 2006; 
(b)    Persistent reports of abuse in custody;
(c)    Poor conditions of detention and persistent overcrowding in detention facilities;
(d)    Excessive use of isolation with regards to pre-trial detainees and prisoners and lack of regulation of the frequency of such isolation; 
(e)    Instances of group self-mutilation by prisoners reportedly as a form of protest for ill-treatments;
(f)    Lack of access to independent medical personnel in pre-trial detention centres and the reported failure to register signs of torture and ill-treatment or to accept detainee’s claims of torture and ill-treatment as the basis for an independent medical examination;
(g)    Persistent high incidence of death in custody, in particular in pre-trial detention (e.g. the case of the former KNB General Zhomart Mazhrenov) some of which are alleged to have followed torture or ill-treatment (art.11).