The list runs from the chairmen of the Astana, Almaty, West Kazakhstan, East Kazakhstan and Aktobe maslikhats through the Federation of Trade Unions’ chairman Satybaldy Dauletalin, the employers’ confederation PARYZ, the Republican Bar’s chairman Madi Myrzagarayev, the head of the fund “Qazaqstan khalqyna”, Lyazzat Chinkisbayeva, Kazakhtelecom’s board chairman Bagdat Musin, the presidential adviser and writer Bauyrzhan Omarov, and Apple’s head of government relations for Central Asia and Armenia, Adilkhan Kopabayev. Its ethnocultural third names the Russian, Slavic and Cossack association, the Chechen-Ingush “Vainakh”, the Uzbek “Dustlik”, Tajik, Kyrgyz, Turkmen, Azerbaijani, Armenian, Uyghur, Korean, German, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Lithuanian, Tatar, Dungan and Karachay-Balkar associations and the Turkish “Akhyska”; 3 members chair or deputise in regional branches of the Adilet party; 2 are Olympic medallists.
The Assembly is gone from the statute book, and its associations fill a third of the new list.
Under the law the Council drafts proposals on the main lines of domestic policy, submits draft laws to the Kurultai, can initiate a referendum and organises the Congress of Leaders of World and Traditional Religions; its Secretariat is a state body; its chairman is elected at a session; a regular session meets at least once a year. Tuesday’s order sets the date and the city and tells the Secretariat to organise the session; it names no agenda.
The Assembly is gone from the statute book, and its associations fill a third of the new list. Created in 1995, the Assembly of the People of Kazakhstan was the institution through which the country’s ethnic associations spoke to the presidency for 3 decades; the constitutional law’s Article 23 repeals the law of 20 October 2008 on which it rested. The Council joins the Kurultai and the vice-presidency among the institutions the new constitution created.
What the 2 days in Astana will produce is a chairman, under the law’s Article 8, and whatever the members bring: the law lets them put draft laws before the Kurultai, and the first session is the first test of whether a consultative body of 126 appointed names does so.