Kazakhstan Cops Protect Citizens' Free Speech Rights By Arresting A Protester Holding A Blank Sign

Kazakhstan police unintentionally helped a protester prove his point. To protest the lack of free speech protections in the country, Aslan Sagutdinov engaged in a physical representation of a thought experiment.

To test the limits of his right to peacefully demonstrate in Kazakhstan, Aslan Sagutdinov, 22, stood in a public square holding a blank sign, predicting he would be detained.

He was right.

Sometimes it sucks to be right. Sagutdinov hoped to point out the "idiocy" of his country and its laws. Protesting nothing in particular, he was arrested by police and taken to the station. So far, there's been nothing reported as to which charges, if any, he'll be facing. But it's too late for the cops and his idiotic country. The point has already been made.

The police argued -- via an official statement -- that order must be maintained or something. According to the police, officers had "received a report" of an "unknown male" holding a blank placard and drawing a small crowd of curious onlookers. Rather than align themselves with the content of Sagutdinov's placard and do nothing, officers chose to something. And that "something" was to drive their irony-proof squad car to the scene and detain the protester.

The official explanation does not make the country look any less idiotic.

The police statement maintained that the authorities "were acting within the boundaries of the law."

And then, because it couldn't possibly drill Sagutdinov's point home any harder, the police released another statement asserting the protester was wrong because he was right.

Bolatbek Beldibekov, the head of the local police department's press service, told the newspaper Uralskaya Nedelya that the offense was not that he demonstrated with the blank placard. Rather, he said, Mr. Sagutdinov ran afoul of the law by making the political statement that "there is no democracy and free speech in Kazakhstan" in a public place.

Feel free to take as much time as you need to wrap your head around that statement.

Apparently, protesters in Kazakhstan have a Constitutional right to "peacefully" engage in "rallies, demonstrations, street processions, and pickets." But those rights are more like privileges and come with several caveats attached. Multiple court decisions and amendments have watered down this right from a given to a theoretical by allowing individual government agencies to decide whether or not they'll allow protests in front of their buildings or whether "peaceful processions" will actually be allowed to proceed from one place to another.

The protections are also badly-written, allowing the government to determine almost anything citizens believe would be protected expression to be unprotected and subject to criminal charges. Here are just a few of the many, many problems of this so-called right, as explained by Kazakhstan human rights activists.

The Law, together with decisions of local representative agencies limits the places for holding assemblies of citizens and public associations. In a series of cities, are established strictly out-of-the way places, as a rule, located on the outskirts of the city. Higher officials and local authorities, and also some political organizations, for the holding of assemblies, have the unfounded exclusive right to use squares in the city center, in comparison with citizens and their associations, which is discrimination. In addition to the element of discrimination, this is a violation of the essence of freedom of assembly. In fact, there can be no reasonable substantiation, from the viewpoint of international standards, to bind the realization of freedom of assembly to one location. Moreover, not all forms of assembly can be held in such conditions, since pickets, demonstrations or processions virtually cannot be contained to one place in the city.

[...]

The Law does not give clear definitions of types of peaceful assembly, which violates the principles of legal predictability and specificity. Any cluster of people in such a situation could be potentially termed an assembly in the sense of the Law, and correspondingly, illegal, if there was no permission given by an executive agency of the government. In other words, citizens seeking to lay flowers on a memorial or carrying a petition to the authorities, participants of flash mobs, courtyard meetings of apartment residents, etc may be held to administrative accountability. In addition, the Law does not contain a distinction between who is considered a participant in an assembly and who is not. This makes it possible to hold accountable anyone found in the location where an assembly is held.

This is why someone holding a blank sign can be arrested for protesting nothing. The sanctity of the whatever-the-fuck must be maintained by the immediate subduing of dissenting voices, even when it isn't immediately clear what they're dissenting from. The government has made an ass of itself and confirmed what many citizens already feared: their right to protest isn't being protected by their government.