#NotExtremists

In Kazakhstan, the women who document repression are now being prosecuted for it. We are Veritas — and we’re watching our colleagues become the next cases. We are an independent initiative of women human rights defenders. Our work is simple: we record who is being arrested, and we tell the UN, the OSCE, and the EU. For that, our own members Alma Nurusheva and Roza Musayeva — both named in two European Parliament resolutions — now face prosecution. Donations we collected for prisoners’ families have been turned into “evidence” against us. This is financial repression: punish the people who help, by treating their help as a crime. And it’s spreading to the women around us. Aliya Isenova and Raigul Sadyrbayeva, defenders from the Yelimai initiative, are being built into criminal cases in Semey over “internet chats” that never existed — fabricated from nothing, in the same wave of repression around the artist Nurzhan Sembayev. Bakhytzhan Toregozhina, who has defended prisoners in Kazakhstan for years, is targeted too — her post supporting a jailed satirist was sent for “extremism analysis.” Solidarity itself is now treated as a crime. @tomaszdechovsky — your event praises Kazakhstan’s “democratic modernisation.” This is what it actually looks like: a country that prosecutes the very women who report its abuses to your institutions. The European Parliament already knows our names. It wrote them into its resolutions. Please don’t now give Tokayev’s government our Parliament’s stage to pretend none of this is happening. Stand with the defenders, not the government detaining them. Put Kazakhstan on the agenda for an urgent resolution in July. #ActivistsNotExtremists #Kazakhstan #WomenHumanRightsDefenders #HumanRights #Tokayev #PoliticalPrisoners #EU #EuropeanParliament