Reports

This report shows that Kazakhstan’s education system segregates and isolates children with disabilities. Even for children who can access schools in their communities, most are taught in separate classrooms with other children with disabilities. Thousands are in special schools for children with disabilities, often far from their homes. Others are educated at home, with a teacher visiting for a few hours per week at best. Children in closed psychiatric institutions receive very little or no education.

This report details the significant legal and practical obstacles workers in Kazakhstan must overcome to organize and defend their interests in the workplace. Human Rights Watch interviewed more than 50 trade union leaders, labor activists, and workers in key industries across Kazakhstan, and documented harassment, surveillance, and, in some cases, spurious legal prosecution or dismissals in apparent retaliation for labor activism. The Kazakh government should take immediate steps to lift restrictions on workers’ rights and the ability to organize.

This 31-page report documents pervasive homophobic attitudes, hateful treatment, and failure of police and other government agencies to protect LGBT people in Kazakhstan. The report is based on in-depth interviews with LGBT people, activists, human rights experts, and social service and health practitioners in Kazakhstan. Human Rights Watch also analyzed the proposed “propaganda” legislation presented in Kazakhstan’s parliament early in 2015 that was later scrapped.

This report analyzes the tactics employed by Kazakh authorities and three companies operating in the oil and gas sector in western Kazakhstan to restrict workers’ rights to freedom of assembly, association, and expression leading up to and during peaceful labor strikes that began in May 2011. Local authorities broke the strike at one of the companies in June.

This 115-page report documents how some employers confiscated migrant workers' passports, failed to provide them with written contracts, did not pay regular wages, cheated them of earnings, and required them to work excessively long hours.

The 55-page report is being released before the OSCE Ministerial Council meeting on December 4 and 5 in Helsinki. The report documents Kazakhstan's extensive restrictions on freedom of religion, expression, and assembly, which are inconsistent with its international obligations on human rights.

In this 10-page briefing paper, Human Rights Watch articulates how the European Union should make respect for human rights an integral part of its new Central Asia strategy. The strategy, an initiative of the German EU Presidency, replaces years of an uncoordinated approach by the European Union to the five Central Asian countries, which were once part of the Soviet Union.

This 53-page report details government harassment of Kazakhstan's opposition through arbitrary criminal and misdemeanor charges and threats of job dismissal, in many cases aimed at preventing them from running for public office.

Human rights abuse against injection drug users and sex workers in Kazakhstan is fueling one of the fastest growing AIDS epidemics in the world, Human Rights Watch said in this new report.The 54-page report, “Fanning the Flames: How Human Rights Abuses are Fueling the AIDS Epidemic in Kazakhstan,” documents instances of violent police brutality, lack of due process, harassment and stigmatizati

In a new report released ahead of this week's parliamentary elections in Kazakhstan, Human Rights Watch charged that the government was repeating the manipulation used in the January election of President Nazarbaev. These tactics, which include the banning of opposition candidates and censoring the media will taint the polls for the lower house of parliament, to be elected on October 10.

The first major expression of popular anger in the Soviet Union occurred in the republic of Kazakhstan in December 1986, when thousands of youths took to the streets to protest the appointment by Moscow of Gennady Kolbin as First Party Secretary for Kazakhstan. In the violence that followed, at least three people were killed by government forces and hundreds were wounded.