Unregistered foreign channels may be prohibited from broadcasting in Kazakhstan

Broadcasting of foreign TV channels that are not officially registered in Kazakhstan may be prohibited soon, tengrinews reports citing Deputy Attorney General Andrey Kravchenko. 

The topic has not been on the country's agenda for a while, but it is far from being new. The development was set into motion two years ago when the Law "On Television and Radio Broadcasting" was adopted on March 1, 2012. Among other things, it required foreign TV and radio channels to get register with an authorized body before March 1, 2013. Failure to comply with this rule was to result in exclusion from network and satellite broadcasting.

"We are now very concerned that almost half of the Russian channels operating in Kazakhstan remain unaccounted for our authorized state agency. They have to applied there and got registered. (...) And now we want to raise this issue to the government. We believe that the channels that have not registered with the authorized agency, should be prohibited from broadcasting in Kazakhstan," Kravchenko said during a Q&A session in the Kazakh Senate in the context of legal amendments relating to extremism and terrorism.

"They [channels] often refer to the fact that this [broadcasting] is done through Kazakhstan-based providers. 'We do not distribute anything here, your own companies do it,' they tell us. We believe that measures need be taken with respect to these companies and these channels. I hope that we put things in order here. And we know what instruments we can use to do it," Kravchenko concluded.