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Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev has signed a controversial set of amendments into law banning “LGBT propaganda.” Kazakh and international rights activists caution the amendments will institutionalize discrimination against LGBT people while giving authorities an additional tool to chill and suppress free speech. One of the nine amendments signed by the president on December 30 modifies a 2002 children’s rights law to ban the “dissemination of information about non-traditional sexual orientation,” and specifically information “with the goal of forming a positive societal opinion” of it. Other amendments extend bans on LGBT propaganda to legislation regulating culture, education, advertising, mass media and cinema. Supporters of the amendments argue the restrictions are necessary to protect children from content featuring LGBT people. “The most important thing is that the ban is on the internet and social media. … We know ourselves that children don’t have fully developed minds,” Maksutbek Aitmaganbet, a member of the Union of Fathers civil society group, told Kazakh television station 24KZ December 19. Critics deride the amendments as repressive and reactionary. “Any attempt to ban visibility, discussion or support of LGBT people is not the defense of traditional values, it’s a rejection of elementary human rights,” Abdel Mukhtarov, a gay rights activist, said at an Almaty press conference in late 2025. Others describe the Kazakh legislation as a copycat version of a 2013 Russian law. “This is too much of a coincidence, it seems, to be accidental,” Kazakh human rights lawyer Tatiana Chernobil told Current Time TV in November. Rights activists say they will fight the new ban in court.

Each pile was a tree trunk hammered upside-down into the shore of Strangford Lough.

The more dense branches are eroding slower than the trunk, leaving these skeletal structures sticking out of the mud.