Joshua Foust at Registan.net has a piece up about the swift show trial conviction of Yevgeny Zhovtis, which has decidedly changed his mind about the OSCE Chairmanship being given to Kazakhstan.
While Zhovtis is only one guy, the pattern of harassing and intimidating rights activists and opposition politicians has gotten substantially worse since Kazakhstan’s winning of the OSCE Chair. Thus, I need to come clean: I was not only wrong, but horribly wrong in thinking the OSCE Chairmanship would be a boon to Kazakhstan. It has been the opposite: a cover for worse repression than before.
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