State Department valiantly defends Borat's civil liberties

Posted By Christine Y. Chen Wednesday, March 7, 2007 - 7:07 PM Share

The U.S. State Department released its 2006 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices yesterday. Tucked away in all the jargon in the report on Kazakhstan was this gem, filed under the section titled Internet Freedom:

In December 2005 the government deemed as offensive the content of a satirical web site controlled by British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen and revoked the .kz domain."

Sacha Baron Cohen, is, of course, the British actor who plays a fictional Kazakh TV reporter in the movie Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.

Shortly before the revocation of the ".kz" domain, a Kazakh government official had threatened to take "legal measures" against Cohen. Responding in the character of Borat, Cohen—who happens to be Jewish—said:

I ... fully support my government's position to sue this Jew."

In reality, Cohen didn't skip a beat, moving his site to www.borat.tv. As Nurlan Isin, president of the Association of Kazakh IT Companies, explained at the time, "We've done this so he can't badmouth Kazakhstan under the .kz domain name." So it's a stretch, to say the least, for the U.S. State Department to lump Cohen's case in with the very real and serious human rights abuses that permeate the rest of the report.

Editor's note: Passport blogger Preeti Aroon also contributed to this post.

EXPLORE:CENTRAL ASIA, BUSH ADMINISTRATION, FREEDOM, HUMAN RIGHTS, INTERNET

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