At that point, 250 amendments were made to various codices and 12 laws. “There are things that get in the way of journalists’ work – why not remove them? And we are busy removing them,” Abayev said as he presented his new legislation. “After that, we’ll approach the issue more conceptually. All the amendments are already in the Codex; some of them have been there for 20 years. And now we’re making things easier for the media by consolidating all the changes in one document, so that the whole media sphere is aware of them. Everything is already there in one law or another.”

According to the minister, what was still missing was the concept of “propaganda”, which was added to the Media Law - and seen by experts as potentially dangerous. Another was the lack of a requirement for agreement when disseminating legal secrets and for the obligatory identification of users posting information on the internet. So, since the Media Law was passed, journalists in Kazakhstan who have uncovered compromising facts about senior officials have had to ask for their permission to publish it and warn the public about it. Otherwise, reporters could be faced with court cases that they will inevitably lose.

“Any official can file a court case if they believe that there is a family secret contained in case documents,” journalist Asel Djanabayeva told the internet portal Informburo.kz. “But the concept of ‘family secret’ is not part of marriage and family law. If I am involved in an investigation and want to report on how much a minister is worth, I can’t write about his wife because he might believe that I am thereby uncovering a family secret. The new law doesn’t say that he has to prove this. He can turn to the courts. Meanwhile, the article is automatically removed, plus a fine and moral damages.”

Olga Didenko, a media lawyer with the international Internews Network, points out the vagueness of a number of points. According to Didenko, when it comes to the wording on “propaganda” in the law, a significant part of the assessment is given over to how “total” a piece of information is presented. It’s not, however, clear who will make an assessment of the positive, neutral or negative mood, and how they will do it.