Kazakhstan’s president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, has approved a controversial new law on religion, dashing the last-ditch hopes of human rights campaigners that he might veto it over freedom of conscience concerns.

Hopes that Nazarbayev might strike the bill down were pretty vain, since it was the president himself who demanded the law to counteract the rising extremist threat in Kazakhstan.
The most controversial aspect of the legislation is a ban on prayer in state organizations, which covers everything from the president’s office down to local government buildings, universities and military barracks. Rights watchdogs are also concerned about tighter registration procedures for religious associations.
Nazarbayev’s approval came the day after a senior cleric reiterated the mainstream Islamic clergy’s opposition to the law in its current form. Speaking at Almaty’s Institute of Political Solutions, Nurmukhamed Iminov, the deputy imam of Almaty, said the Spiritual Board of Muslims of Kazakhstan (the state-backed body that runs Islamic affairs) did not approve of banning prayers in state institutions.
The legislation was drafted and signed with unprecedented speed: Nazarbayev urged parliament to adopt a new law on September 1, and a hastily written bill passed in the lower house three weeks later. The upper house followed suit on September 29 – ignoring an appeal by Freedom House to reject the bill.
Nazarbayev likes to paint Kazakhstan as a haven of religious freedom, but his promise that the law would not be aimed at “prohibiting freedom of conscience” now rings a little hollow. While observers agree that Kazakhstan is facing a rise in extremist activity, critics see this fast-track legislation as an ill-conceived knee-jerk reaction.
Contrast the speed of this bill with the snail-pace progress of Astana’s commitment to decriminalize libel. The international community has been calling on Kazakhstan to liberalize restrictive defamation laws for years, and Astana recently promised it would – in 2014.
It just goes to show that where there’s a will, there’s a way.