“Converting union lawyer Natalia Sokolova’s six year prison sentence to a
three year suspended sentence is a positive step by the authorities and
wonderful news for Sokolova and her family, but she should never have been
imprisoned for speaking out on workers’ rights in the first place,” said
Mihra Rittmann, a Human Rights Watch researcher in Central Asia.
The strike by oil workers and the riots several months later triggered one of
the biggest challenges to the authority of Nursultan Nazarbayev, the Kazakh
president, in Kazakhstan’s 20-year post Soviet history.
Since the riots the authorities have cracked down on both the media and
opposition activists.
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