In opening the Congress of the Leaders of World and Traditional Religions in June 2015, a convocation held every three years in Astana, Kazakhstan, the country’s president Nursultan Nazarbayev presented his nation as “a successful model of coexistence between 18 religions living in peace, harmony and mutual understanding with each other.” He further described the country’s legislation on religious associations as “based on the principle of equality and freedom of conscience.”
The Diplomat journalist Casey Michel describes this purported tolerance as “international spin.” With the country’s suspension of the Jehovah’s Witnesses headquarters in Almaty and the sentencing of a 61-year-old believer to five years in prison on a charge of “inciting religious hatred,” Casey states: “any claims toward putative freedoms of religion in Kazakhstan have clearly crumbled over the past few years. Like political or press freedoms before it, religious freedom in Kazakhstan has only constricted over the prior decade. Following notorious 2011 legislation that shuttered some two-thirds of ’nontraditional’ religious groups in the country, Kazakhstan has only continued closing the noose around remaining ‘nontraditional’ religions — especially those of the Christian variety.”
A 2017 report by the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) expressed concern over the deterioration of religious rights in the country and recommended that the U.S. government urge Kazakhstan “to ensure its anti-extremist laws do not serve as a pretext for infringement on the right to peaceful religious observance and expression,” and work to secure the “immediate release of individuals imprisoned for their peaceful religious activities or affiliations”.
Casey points out that the “burgeoning persecution of domestic Christian denominations has played no small role in the USCIRF’s decision to list Kazakhstan as one of the 28 worst countries internationally for religious freedoms.”
