As the most flagrant manifestation of this crisis, the press cites the self-mutilation of 24 inmates of a prison in Astana a few weeks ago protesting inhumane treatment, humiliation and beatings. Even the government-controlled TV channel “Khabar” went out of its usual way of “selective reporting” and showed the images of the bleeding convicts taken to a prison hospital, who had knifed themselves in the stomach. The prison administration said that the wounds did not threaten the lives of the prisoners and refrained from further comments.

At a recent seminar held by the British Foreign Office and the International Association of Lawyers in Almaty, it was pointed out that judges and prosecutors have a key role to play in preventing torture in detention centers. The effectiveness of combating police violations and abuses could be heightened by a combined application of international and national laws. Deputy Justice minister Sabyrzhan Bekbosynov thinks that Kazakhstan made a major step towards rooting out tortures by ratifying the UN Convention against Torture in 1998. He considers that Kazakhstan has a strong political will to humanize the penal legislation. Bekbosynov said that the newly created department of social protection, created at the Ministry of Justice to respond to complaints coming in from citizens subjected to violations, has received 247 complaints within a few months. The deputy director of the International Human Rights Bureau in Kazakhstan Zhemis Turmagambetova says that seminars based on theory and discussions around terminological definitions of tortures are not productive in practical terms.

Experts believe that in the majority of cases, detainees are subjected to torture and beatings during pre-trial detention or interrogation in order to squeeze out a “confession” from a suspect. But only in cases of exceptional brutality do some torturers in police uniforms stand trial. More than that, the current system of promotion in police ranks, based on the rate of “unraveled” criminal cases, encourage policemen to resort to Gestapo-like methods to make detainees confess to crimes they never committed.

Suicide attempts in prisons of Kazakhstan have become frequent over the last two years. Harsh prison conditions and abuses by police are only a visible tip of the problem on the surface, which makes a part of the general disrespect for human rights pervading all spheres of public life. According to legal experts and human rights activists, this dismal state of things cannot be changed in a positive way unless the whole of the judicial system is reformed from top to bottom.

Political parties, non-governmental organizations, and officials from the Supreme Court and Prosecutor-General’s Office, converged on December 8 at a round table to discuss ways of reforming the judicial system. Despite divergences of views, they all recognized the necessity of getting all democratic strata involved into the process. A civilized justice system, it was stressed by all participants of the discussion, is not imaginable without establishing public control over judicial power. But further discussions revealed the clash of interests in power-sharing between the judges and prosecutors. Under the current law, prosecutors are empowered to control the course of an investigation and to overrule a court decision. Amassing too much power in one hand, according to the Association of Judges, leaves loopholes for abuses.

A representative of the Prosecutor-General’s Office reacted calmly to such remarks, saying that important issues in the judicial system would be considered soon by the Constitutional Council, and not at a round table. In his turn he criticized the practice, applied by the Supreme Court and regional courts, of sending back cases to lower courts. He said that judges in lower courts depend very much on the chairman of the court.

This long-debated issue seems to be the core of the reform of the judicial system in Kazakhstan. Even pro-government parties like “Otan” put up a demand that judges, at least at district levels, should be elected by residents, and not appointed by officials at the top. The profession of a judge is one of the highest paid in Kazakhstan. Recently the government came up with a proposal to parliament to further raise the salaries of judges. But the majority of parliamentarians do not believe that this will help eradicate corruption among judges.