Kazakh journalists staged a protest, releasing two special editions of the oppositional paper Assandi Times. The Dec. 19 edition featured several pages of materials about the draft law, and the front page displayed logos of organizations and newspapers who were against the draft law and the headline “To Our and Your Freedom!” There were also statements and open letters to Nazarbaev from several international organizations. The Dec. 26 edition had two pages of materials on the draft law. In addition, experts say the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe sent Nazarbaev a letter, offering to help draft a law that would comply with international standards for freedom of speech.

Journalists and human rights groups have long criticized the draft law, which they say gives excessive power to the Ministry of Information and will allow it to shut down media outlets without a court hearing. The draft law is the third and, experts say, most draconian of Kazakhstan’s draft laws.

Assandi Times editor Irina Petrushova said she hopes Nazarbaev will refuse to sign the law, and thus she plans another protest edition later in January. “We have no hope in the Senate, and a very small hope that the President will rethink and not sign this draft law. But, again, this is a very small hope. We will continue to speak out against this law,” Petrushova said. She said she believed that if international organizations vocally opposed the draft law, the President would decide not to sign the law.

But considering many politicians’ recent statements, this seems increasingly unlikely. Nazarbaev said Dec. 23 that international organizations should not interfere in Kazakhstan’s internal affairs and should “not dictate which laws to pass and which to reject.” The day of the vote, the Mazhilis press service released a statement from Deputy Erasyl Abylkasymov, who said he had previously decided to vote against the law because of a certain wording. But upon reading it more carefully, he said he had decided he is “fully on the side of the government” because the West was urging Kazakhstan to reject the law in an attempt to control the country. “The West, of course, does not want us to be independent from them. In connection with this, I ask you to defend our informational space, and therefore I am in favor of passing the government’s version [of the draft law],” Abylkasymov said in the statement. Other deputies expressed similar opinions.

Abylkasymov also pointed to Russian opposition to the law, saying the Kazakh media was too Russified. Newspapers and TV stations, like NTV and Izvestiya, are Kazakh counterparts of Russian organizations. In the draft law, the amount of material which can be rebroadcast is limited, and Kazakh-language programming must compose 50 percent of the programming and its playing time must be distributed evenly.

Toby Mendel, Asia Program Director for the free-speech organization Article 19, said the law clearly contradicts international standards for freedom of expression, so it is not an “internal” affair of Kazakhstan. “By international agreement, by international law and by basic principles of respect for human dignity, human rights are not internal matters. No government that is serious about respecting human rights would make a claim like that. … There is no question but that the law, if passed, would breach international standards relating to freedom of expression,” he said. Article 19 released a report analyzing the draft law’s provisions in September.

Evgeniy Zhovtis, head of the Kazakhstan International Bureau for Human Rights and Rule of Law, said his outlook for the future of the media in Kazakhstan was “generally pessimistic” because this example showed that “no amount of protest … can change anything.” Nonetheless, he and other lawyers and journalists pointed to how novel recent protests have been; no similar protests with such wide international support have been staged by Kazakh journalists. The importance of the protest, then, may lie in whether it will bring continued solidarity.