Elnara Shorazova, an Austrian national who became the second wife of Rakhat Aliyev – a one-time exile living in Malta – is complaining that the Maltese government’s compliance with a freezing order requested by the Kazakhstan authorities, breached her human rights because the request stemmed from a regime that could not offer any guarantees of a fair trial.
In her complaint, signed by lawyer Joe Giglio, Shorazova complains that the freezing order on her Malta assets – in place since 2014 – was based on politically motivated trumped-up charges.
She said the measure had no genuine public interest, especially in Malta, and that Malta was positively obliged not to be complicit in the breaches of human rights perpetrated in Kazakhstan.
She also complained that she had suffered a breach of her right to a fair trial because of the long constitutional proceedings in Malta in which she protested the asset freeze and the Maltese collaboration with the Kazakh investigation.
Rakhat Aliyev, later Shoraz, was married to the daughter of Kazakh dictator Nursultan Nazarbayev, having occupied a high-ranking role in the country’s secret service. But he fell out of favour with his father-in-law, and by 2007 while serving as ambassador in Vienna, he was forcibly divorced from Nazarbayev’s daughter. Aliyev has always claimed that his pro-democracy views imperilled Nazarbayev’s iron grip on the country.
Like similar dissidents Aliyev went into exile, but he was dogged by accusations of having commissioned the kidnapping of two Nurbank bankers later found dead. In absentia, he was found guilty by a Kazakh court and sentenced to 20 years’ jail.
Austria refused a 2007 request for extradition, citing the former Soviet republic’s human rights record. But at the same time, criminal proceedings were instituted against him in Vienna on charges of money laundering and the Nurbank murders.
Photo source: picture from an open source