Kazakhstan is – like many other countries with a post-Soviet legacy – battling corrosive and widespread corruption. The Council of Europe’s Group of States against Corruption (GRECO) has called the level of corruption in Kazakhstan “serious” and estimates that it is pervasive in numerous sectors in the country, including the public sector and public institutions. The judiciary in Kazakhstan is also affected by this tendency, to the detriment of rule of law in the country.
A pattern of cases of judicial corruption can be observed in Kazakhstan. For instance, in 2020, a judge in a criminal hearing of bribery against a civil servant who had illegally leased a plot of land received a bribe of $26,000 in return for acquitting the civil servant. The corruption came to light when the appellate court overturned the acquittal. The judge was caught red-handed returning the bribe to the civil servant.
Transparency International publishes annual scores measuring corruption perception for almost all countries in the world. Kazakhstan ranks 93rd out of 180; compared to Kyrgyzstan (141), Tajikistan (162), Turkmenistan (170), and Uzbekistan (121), it performs best in the Central Asian region. Globally, Kazakhstan is flanked by countries like India (tied with India at 93), Belarus (98), and Albania (98).
The Norwegian U4 Anti-Corruption Resource Centre has analyzed corruption trends in Kazakhstan. Such trends include grand corruption, where people in power have used their position to extract public funds, and also nepotism, where people use their position to give preferential treatment to members of their family, clan, tribe or network. A famous example of both kinds of corruption was how former President Nursultan Nazarbayev and his family controlled assets and gained vast wealth through corruption schemes. But corruption in the public sector is also widespread – including in the judiciary.
Since 2021, 30 judges have been held accountable for corruption, resulting in 15 prison sentences, which notably is more than in the previous eight years combined. One example is the former chairman of the Kostanay District Court, who last year was sentenced to nine years’ imprisonment for receiving a bribe of almost $40,000 in 2022. Since the end of 2023, three judges in Almaty region and Konaev city have also been accused of corruption. More worrying, in Talgar, a judge received a bribe in exchange for altering the compulsory medical measures for a person who had abused a child.
This problem is not new in Kazakhstan, although it is perhaps more visible as more judges are being convicted than before. In 2012, two judges of Kazakhstan’s Supreme Court were sentenced to lengthy prison terms for accepting a bribe of $70,000 from a private company for “favorable consideration of its claim.”
Olga Didenko, a local expert in anti-corruption efforts, highlighted that much of the corruption in the judiciary goes under the radar, although the bribes are significant, and the problem seems all-encompassing throughout the sector:
Corruption in the judicial system remains a problem and seriously undermines efforts to strengthen the independence of the judiciary. We should remember that the number of cases identified and judges convicted for corruption is much lower than, for example, convicted employees of state bodies of law enforcement agencies. However, the bribes are larger, as is the damage to society in such cases of corruption in the judicial system. In 2023, three judges were convicted of accepting bribes for making favorable decisions… But these are only the identified cases that reached court. According to NGOs, corruption in the judicial system remains at a high level.
The Anti-Corruption Agency is the body responsible for investigating corruption in Kazakhstan. Although the agency is carrying out much work to address the pressing issues, its work cannot succeed without legal reform. The two simplest ways to overcome corruption in the judiciary are to increase the salaries of judges, while also removing benefits from their employment conditions. The independence of judges is closely related to their income, and the size of their salaries should be public and regulated by law. Unfortunately, in Kazakhstan, judges’ salaries are not public.
According to the Kyiv Recommendations, a set of guidelines and recommendations advising on how to uphold independence of the judiciary in Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia, it is advisable to remove benefits (such as bonuses and other privileges) for judges and replace these with higher salaries that ensure the judges a standard of living that reflects the level of responsibility of their profession, in order to fight the risk of corruption in the sector.
If these pressing issues are not dealt with, rule of law in Kazakhstan will continue to be under threat, and the situation is unlikely to improve.