Nur-Sultan, May 27, 2021 – Chaired by Ambassador-at-Large of Kazakhstan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs Usen Suleimen, an online meeting of the Consultative and Advisory Body “Dialogue Platform on Human Dimension” was held today.
The event was attended by Kazakhstani human rights NGOs, Members of the Parliament, the Secretary of the Human Rights Commission under the President of the Republic of Kazakhstan, the Commissioners for Human Rights and for the Rights of the Child, representatives of the Supreme Court, the Constitutional Council, relevant ministries, as well as international partners – United Nations Development Program, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), the OSCE, the European Union, the US and Canadian embassies, USAID, and the Penal Reform International.
Ambassador Suleimen in his opening remarks noted the initiative of President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, voiced by him at the fifth meeting of the National Council of Public Trust (NCPC) on 25 February 2021, on the need to develop and introduce indicators of human rights observance in Kazakhstan, designed to become a full-fledged tool to assess the quality of their implementation in accordance with high international standards.
Pointing to the existence, in the current international practice, of 14 global indicators developed by OHCHR, the Head of State proposed to start, on their basis, the phased introduction of national indicators for assessing the observance of human rights, which will strengthen state policy in this area. In this context, the meeting’s participants reviewed international and national approaches to indicators of human rights protection and their compatibility with indicators and indicators of the UN Sustainable Development Goals, including indicators of the right to education.
Discussions on each item on the meeting’s agenda were open and constructive, with elaboration of specific proposals for further interaction on these issues between government bodies and NGOs.
