(iPoster) Teaching the State: Administrative Courts and Legal Reform in Kazakhstan

• In Event: Poster Sessions: Law and Courts & Elections and Voter Behavior
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Law and Courts

Abstract

In 2021, Kazakhstan created specialized administrative courts for citizens to challenge government decisions. Within three years, citizens were winning over half of cases—and in housing and land disputes, over 70%. Judges actively assist unrepresented plaintiffs: reformulating deficient claims, identifying correct administrative acts to challenge, explaining procedural requirements. Why would an authoritarian state create institutions where citizens regularly prevail against government agencies?

Scholars typically explain courts in authoritarian settings through functionalist accounts: gathering information about discontent, legitimating rule, monitoring local agents, disciplining bureaucrats. From this perspective, administrative courts represent strategic investments in bureaucratic control. Yet the Kazakhstani courts' activist orientation exceeds what such accounts would predict—a posture more expansive than regime interests alone would require. This paper investigates how Kazakhstan's administrative courts developed this activist orientation and examines its limits. Drawing on legislative history, 5,300 Supreme Court decisions, and interviews with judges, government attorneys, and civil society lawyers, I advance three arguments.

First, Kazakhstan's administrative courts have developed what I term a "pedagogical mission"—an orientation centered on assisting citizens and educating agencies about proper procedure. Judges help litigants understand what relief they can seek, explain requirements, and actively investigate disputes. The Supreme Court has aggressively reversed decisions it views as insufficiently attentive to citizen interests, articulating expansive doctrines of the "active role of the court."

Second, I trace how this activist interpretation became possible. The 2021 Code followed an uneasy trajectory shaped by forces beyond regime strategy: international rankings pressure created demand for visible reform, but a decade of prior drafts had created constituencies invested in adoption regardless of regime priorities. German development assistance shaped citizen-protective provisions—burden of proof on agencies, mandatory preliminary procedures, judicial activism. Legislative contingencies allowed provisions that might otherwise have been diluted to survive. Most importantly, judges recruited from outside the judiciary—bokoviki, "those from the side"—joined the Supreme Court to implement reforms they had helped design, breaking with prior judicial culture that had equated state interests with agency positions.

Third, I examine effects and limits. Government legal departments that initially lost the vast majority of cases learned to structure acts to withstand scrutiny; agencies adapted from recognition that courts would consistently rule against them. Yet limits persist: the same disputes recur, agencies refuse mediation even when defeat is certain, and officials request court decisions to shift responsibility upward. More fundamentally, activism appears bounded by political sensitivity—in cases involving assemblies, elections, and migration, success rates drop dramatically, and interview subjects acknowledged certain cases are "different."

This bifurcation—activist engagement with routine disputes alongside deference on politically charged matters—suggests legal institutions in authoritarian contexts can develop organizational autonomy while remaining bounded by regime priorities.

Author

• Alisher Juzgenbayev, Department of Political Science, Northwestern University