By Irwin Arieff
(Reuters) - Kazakhstan has had a slow start in cracking down on human rights abuses because of its Soviet roots but is under growing pressure to improve from a booming class of budding capitalists, its top human rights official said on Friday.
The oil-rich central Asian nation has enjoyed rapid economic growth in the last four years and won plaudits for market reforms, luring tens of billions of dollars in foreign investment.
But in 12 years of independence after the Soviet Union's breakup, it has never held an election judged free or fair.
Rights groups criticize the police and say public criticism of President Nursultan Nazarbayev, a former steelmaker who has run the country since Soviet times, is taboo. Some political opponents have ended up in jail or exile.
Bolat Baykadamov, Kazakhstan's human rights ombudsman, welcomed international as well as domestic criticism which he said had led to improvements in government rights policies.
"But the main reason is that our economy and our private sector are developing very fast, and people who have property have a keen interest in the protection of their property and they are pushing for the promotion of human rights," he said in an interview after addressing the U.N. General Assembly.
"We all just emerged from the Soviet era, and the concept of human rights was to a great extent new to our bureaucrats and officials, and there is no wonder that human rights were violated. But now things are changing," Baykadamov said.
"Yes, there are violations of human rights in Kazakhstan. But it is not systematic, and the scope is reducing and it is done more by ignorance than purposefully," he said.
Baykadamov, whose office Nazarbayev created in 2002, said the head of state last week issued a decree bolstering its powers.
It is now authorized to intervene in court cases, ask prosecutors to bring criminal charges against officials accused of rights abuses and initiate parliamentary hearings on alleged human rights violations.
It is also developing a plan for nationwide human rights education but could not find enough money in the budget to open human rights offices next year in every region of the country, he said.
