Background Kazakhstan is the largest country in Central Asia, covering a territory equivalent to the whole of Western Europe. An oil-rich country, Kazakhstan has recovered from the economic crises of the 1990s, and President Nursultan Nazarbayev is determined to turn Kazakhstan into an...

Corruption rumors involving high-echelon officials is a sensitive topic for governments of the CIS. In October last year, ONI wrote a blog post on Kazakhstan’s political censorship of opposition sites. Four Web sites were shut down after they posted transcripts...

Four opposition news Web sites in Kazakhstan were temporarily blocked during the last weeks. The oil-rich Central Asian country with strong ambitions to chair the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) in 2009 has tightened the leash on the...