Reject Draft Law Threatening Freedom of Association

(Bishkek, May 21, 2015) – Kyrgyzstan’s parliament should resolutely reject a “foreign agents” bill when it goes to a first reading, Human Rights Watch said today. On May 19, 2015, the parliamentary human rights committee voted to send the bill to parliament for consideration, and the first reading could be as early as this week.

The “foreign agents” law, if adopted, would require domestic nongovernmental organizations that receive foreign funding and engage in vaguely worded “political activities” to register as “foreign agents.” Such inappropriate and unjustified interference would be incompatible with the right to freedom of association, Human Rights Watch said.

“This bill blatantly flouts Kyrgyzstan’s national and international human rights commitments and will only stigmatize nongovernmental organizations doing important work in Kyrgyzstan,” said Mihra Rittmann, Central Asia researcher at Human Rights Watch. “When the ‘foreign agents’ bill goes to a vote, parliament should reaffirm Kyrgyzstan’s commitment to fundamental freedoms, and resolutely reject it.”

The draft law borrows heavily from a similar “foreign agents” law adopted in Russia in 2012, which has been used to crack down on independent groups.

Kyrgyzstan’s draft law was proposed by three members of parliament in September 2013 and officially registered for consideration in May 2014. The draft law appears aimed at restricting and curtailing the activities of nongovernmental organizations and others working on a wide range of issues, including human rights.

The draft law would impose burdensome reporting requirements on nongovernmental organizations, and create criminal liability for the leaders of nongovernmental organizations “whose work incites citizens to refuse to fulfill their civic duties or commit other unlawful acts.”

The stipulation that foreign-funded nongovernmental groups engaged in “political activities” must register as “foreign agents” would stigmatize such groups and could lead to a public perception that they are spies. Further, “political activities” is a formulation so vague that it could include any organized activity relating to public life. The bill would also grant authorities the right to suspend nongovernmental organizations that have not registered as “foreign agents” for up to six months without a court order.

The draft law contravenes Kyrgyzstan’s constitution as well as its international human rights obligations to protect freedom of association and expression, Human Rights Watch said.

Multiple local, intergovernmental, and international groups have spoken out against the draft law. At a public parliamentary hearing on November 24, 2014, held by the chairperson of the human rights committee, representatives of the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), and the European Union Delegation in Kyrgyzstan opposed the bill’s adoption, saying it does not comply with international human rights standards.

A Justice Ministry representative said at the hearing that the ministry doesn’t have the capacity to carry out such a law. The government administration office, under the prime minister, also issued a negative opinion.

In January, during Kyrgyzstan’s second Universal Periodic Review (UPR) at the UN Human Rights Council, many governments made recommendations to uphold freedom of association. The Kyrgyz government had a mixed response to the recommendations, accepting some, including one to “ensure that any legislation on NGOs is in line with international human rights law,” but delaying an answer to other recommendations specifically urging it not to adopt the “foreign agents” bill.

In October 2013, the OSCE’s Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODHIR) and the Venice Commission, an advisory body of the Council of Europe, issued an interim joint opinion that the draft law “represents an interference into several fundamental rights, in primis the right to freedom of association and the right to freedom of expression of associations and individuals in the Kyrgyz Republic.” They recommended against adopting the bill.

The draft law also contravenes reform expectations set for Kyrgyzstan in April 2014 by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) when it granted Kyrgyzstan’s Parliament “partnership for democracy” status. PACE highlighted that “refraining from adopting laws aimed directly or indirectly at restricting civil society activities” was of key importance for strengthening democracy in Kyrgyzstan.

“This ‘foreign agents’ bill is a grave affront to the many local nongovernmental organizations working to improve Kyrgyzstan, as well as to the government agencies that benefit from their cooperation and consultation,” Rittmann said. “The members of parliament should recall their responsibility to review legislation in light of Kyrgyzstan’s constitution and international standards, and stop this bill in its tracks.”

I mentioned previously that Hungarian verbs have indefinite and definite conjugattions. Here is the past tense conjugation of the verb 'see.'

So here are some example sentences:

Notice that the verbs are both in the definite. But now let's look at what happens if the direct object is a first- or second-person pronoun:

Now isn't that odd. 1st and 2nd person pronouns are about as definite as you can get. Generally definite direct objects co-occur with definite verbs, but first- and second-person direct objects co-occur with indefinite verbs. I admit to major discombobulation on this issue. I don't think I've ever seen anything that makes less linguistic sense than this.

Mirror

Here are my thoughts on the Pimsleur audio course for Hungarian that I downloaded. I've only been working on it a week, so my thoughts are preliminary ones.

Who is the course intended for?

From the material they go over, the course seems intended for businessmen headed to Budapest for a long weekend. I first saw the Pimsleur courses advertised in airplane magazines back in the 70s or 80s, which reinforces my impression of their target audience. So far I have gone over material that would be useful in common social interactions, and hotel and restaurant interactions. That sounds just about perfect for my purposes.

Course structure:

The primary course consists of 30 audio units of 30 minutes each. They give you the opportunity to practice the sentences word by word, then phrase by phrase, and then build them into dialogs. All along they quiz you whether you remember what you have gone over before. They advise you to do each audio unit, and when you get 80% or more of the answers correct, move on to the next lesson. Myself, most of the time I reached 80% on the first pass, but I did each lesson twice anyway because it reinforced the material. I've downloaded the audio onto my Android phone and listen to it with the music app. Here's what I like so far:

1. The audio quality is good. I've never really mastered rounded front vowels, but the audio is good enough for me to actually hear them. I've never had to study a language that has long vs short vowels the way Hungarian does (quite different from English), but I can often hear the difference on the audio. I've never had to speak a language with single vs doubled consonants, but I can often hear the difference on the audio. That's pretty good audio.
2. They use the trick of teaching you to pronounce long words starting at the end syllable and working your way back.
3. They really understand the need for repetition. In unit 5 you are still deliberately practicing again the words from unit 1. This is the only audio course I have come across that really understands that concept.
4. The 30 minute units are a really good size to choose. I think many language courses set unrealistic goals and try to induce a beginning student to do too much. 30 minutes a day is achievable.
5. The 80% goal is very sensible. You don't induce the anal-retentive idea of "I have to know everything perfectly now," and thus you make progress without getting hung up on one or two words.
6. The amount of material they try to cover in 30 minutes is also very sensible. They don't try to do to much. They expand on what you already know and review what you have gone over before.
7. I like the approach where they describe a context in English and then have you apply your Hungarian. One of the bad things about foreign language texts is that they often require the student to deduce a context from a very small number of words that they still haven't mastered completely and that they have never experienced in an actual foreign context. It's stupid. Here you have the context explained to you so you can focus on mastering the words and their pronuncation.
8. They comment on intonation so you can distinguish between questions and statements.
9. The voice talent is both male and female. Hungarian doesn't have grammatical gender, so making that emotional level connection with gender and grammar is not as important as it is for a Slavic or Romance language. Still, it's good to hear it both ways.
10. I actually think the male and female voices have just slightly different dialects. The rounding I hear in their /a/ vowels seems slightly different. Or perhaps it is an actual gender difference? I don't have enough experience yet to know.
11. This is the first time I've done an audio-only (essentially) course. The pacing is great. I love hearing the words before I see them written: it makes me proactive in trying to understand the principles of Hungarian spelling, which are incredibly regular, although odd to those of us who have studied Romance languages.

Response to other criticism

Benny the Irish Polyglot reviewed the Pimsleur Hungarian first course as well. He didn't much care for it. But here's the scoop: Benny is a marvelous advocate for *proactive* learning approaches. He wants to induce the student to proactively pursue the language and spend plenty of time on it and come up with conversation partners and generate one's own audio and download a decent grammar to fill in the blanks and work by Skype with people across the ocean and make thousands of flashcards and read blogs and listen to YouTube broadcasts and generate sample sentences and get them corrected on lang-8.com. That stuff is freaking awesome.

But a businessman going to Budapest for a long weekend is *not* that kind of student. He wants a course that he can put in his ears, not have homework, make some progress, and impress his business buddies who were too lazy to put even that much effort in. For that kind of student the Pimsleur course is great.

Benny hated that there was so much English in the audio. That's because Benny is wanting to immerse himself as much as possible and figure out all the other stuff on his own. That's not what someone wants who is going to make only 30 minutes a day available for study.

Truth to tell, I am usually much more like Benny than the businessman whom Pimsleur targets. I did download a high-powered Hungarian grammar, and I am digging into the tricky points of that grammar, not just the easy bits. Still, I love this course. I'm learning. I'm not having to put in back-breaking effort.

Now to price. I paid about $120 for the course. That included the audio in MP3 format plus a PDF reading booklet. Y'know, I think if I had just bought a HU textbook, I probably would have been too distracted by my other tasks to actually learn anything. The use of the audio means I'm making daily progress because I only have to put in 30 minutes at a time, and usually my curiosity gets the better of me so I look up numbers I haven't learned yet or complete conjugations or read about the cases. In short, the fact that I spent the money for a course that had low-intensity goals is resulting, I think, in me learning more HU than I probably would have otherwise.

One last comment. Even though I'm only intending to put in 30 minutes a day, I usually end up doing the same lesson twice in a day. I just kinda want to. The 30-minute period I can picture adding in a second time in the evening. It reinforces what I learned before. Again, I'm left with the impression that I'm learning better this way than if I had downloaded a teach-yourself textbook.

Conclusions

If you are going to visit Hungary and can only put aside 30 minutes a day for language study, I think the Pimsleur course is an excellent tool for that purpose. I don't regret a dime I've spent.

I'll try to put one more review up after my actual Budapest time to see if I can offer any further insight.