Persons at high risk of HIV infection in Kazakhstan, especially injection drug users and sex workers, face systemic harassment and abuse from police.
Police in Kazakhstan are notorious for torturing and otherwise mistreating detainees, which has led to growing public mistrust of law enforcement agencies. Testimony gathered for this report describes cases of arbitrary arrest, verbal and physical mistreatment including beating with a baton or fists, physical abuse in some cases constituting torture, extortion, the planting of evidence on an IDU's or sex worker's person, forced sex including unprotected sex , and coerced confessions.
They fuel the fears and mistrust sex workers and IDUs have of police, and by extension of other authorities, including government AIDS services. For example, a study among drug users in nine cities of Kazakhstan revealed that IDUs in Almaty and Shymkent in particular practiced high-risk injecting behavior in part due to police persecution; 74 another study showed that one group of drug users in Shymkent who had begun to inject six to eleven months earlier had 72 percent HIV prevalence.
Risky behaviors that could be changed continue unabated. The abuses are indefensible and cannot be justified as necessary to provide reasonable enforcement of laws related to narcotics use and sex work in Kazakhstan.
Police abuse of injection drug users. Our people and society think like this-a drug user is washed up. He's looked upon like a prostitute, like an outcast from society.
