On 30 March 2026, the French-speaking Enterprise Court of Brussels issued a judgment in the case brought by Kyrgyzstan’s Bakai Bank against the Open Dialogue Foundation (ODF) — a ruling with consequences that reach well beyond the parties before the court.
A Watchdog Lost Its ECHR Protection in a Commercial Court
A Belgian court has classified a human-rights NGO as a “commercial enterprise” under Book VI of the Belgian Code of Economic Law on the basis of its publication and advocacy activities. That classification brought ODF within the scope of commercial denigration rules and exposed it to liability for publishing reports on a Kyrgyz bank’s alleged role in circumventing international sanctions against Russia.
Under this logic, ODF — and by extension any civil society organisation that researches, publishes, and advocates on matters of public interest — becomes a market actor subject to the same legal obligations as a commercial competitor. The implications are systemic: organisations such as the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, or any watchdog body publishing policy-relevant findings could, under this reasoning, face unfair market practices claims whenever their work affects the reputation of a company or state-linked institution. This cannot be what the Belgian legislature intended, and it is not what European law, including the EU Anti-SLAPP Directive 2024/1069, was designed to produce.
This reclassification exposed ODF to legal liability for doing precisely what civil society watchdogs are supposed to do: documenting concerns about sanctions circumvention and financial opacity by relying on publicly available statistics and the reporting of independent Kyrgyz media, including Kloop. The court required published information to meet a commercial verification standard designed for disputes between market operators, a test that is structurally impossible for any organisation working in an authoritarian jurisdiction where access to primary banking records is unavailable. Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) required the court to ask a different question entirely: whether ODF had a sufficient factual basis and acted in good faith, a threshold that accepts credible journalistic sources as adequate for a watchdog organisation. The court never asked it. Instead, it measured civil society advocacy by a commercial yardstick and concluded, without engaging with the substance of ODF’s evidence, that the bar had not been met.
That failure had a concrete consequence. The court conducted no analysis of the information environment in which ODF was operating — the state of press freedom in Kyrgyzstan, the pressure on outlets covering sanctions and financial misconduct, or the credibility of the sources ODF relied upon at the time of publication. This context was not incidental. Kloop was a functioning independent news portal when ODF cited its reporting in 2023. In July 2024, the Kyrgyz Supreme Court issued a final decision ordering its liquidation, and officials publicly accused Kloop and Radio Azattyk of using foreign funds to spread false information. The European Parliament’s own delegation to Kyrgyzstan, following its mission in March 2025, concluded that independent media and journalists face increasing pressure in that country, raised these concerns directly with Kyrgyz authorities, and underscored a free press as a key element of the EU-Kyrgyzstan partnership. A court conducting a genuine Article 10 ECHR proportionality analysis could not have ignored this landscape.
Subsequent Negative PR Campaign
The first-instance judgment is already being actively exploited as a propaganda instrument far beyond what the court actually decided. On 7 April 2026, Kyrgyzstan’s Presidential Press Secretary, Askat Alagozov, publicly announced that Bakai Bank had won in Brussels against ODF. Alagozov stated that the court’s decision “serves as clear evidence of the Kyrgyz Republic’s commitment to international law and its readiness to defend the interests of domestic businesses in foreign jurisdictions.” He further recalled that President Sadyr Japarov has repeatedly rejected sanctions concerns, emphasising that pressure on domestic banks is based on “unreliable information spread by certain non-governmental organisations and dishonest individuals.” Pro-government media amplified that framing further, Open.kg headlining it as “Kyrgyzstan’s victory in the court of honour in Brussels” and Vesti.kg stating the ruling “confirms the baselessness of such accusations against Kyrgyz financial institutions” as a whole.
This framing is deliberate and calculated: it illustrates how a judgment in Brussels is used to validate the Kyrgyz government’s broader narrative that civil society reporting on sanctions circumvention is illegitimate. The narrative promoted by Kyrgyzstan’s Presidential Press Secretary in Bishkek was amplified through the targeted placement of op-eds in Brussels, Nicosia and Washington, authored by writers with no prior published engagement with Kyrgyzstan, ODF, sanctions policy, or international law. Cyprus holds the Council of the EU Presidency, making Nicosia a strategically significant target for this messaging. Their publications target ODF’s advocacy campaign against sanctions circumvention throughout 2025 in the EU and the United States. The Washington Examiner op-ed explicitly attacks the testimony of ODF President Lyudmyla Kozlovska before the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission on 24 June 2025.
Furthermore, U.S. Senate Lobbying Disclosure Act filings reveal that in 2025, Hartwell Capitol Consulting was retained by the Volkov Law Group P.C., which paid $160,000 to lobby Congress on two specific subjects: “Impact of U.S. Sanctions on Allied Banking Activities in Kyrgyzstan” and “International Sanctions on Bakai Bank of Kyrgyzstan.” The engagement is documented across quarterly filings spanning the full year 2025.
The registered lobbying subjects, the Kyrgyz presidential spokesman’s public framing of the Brussels ruling as a matter of national interest, the political repression of independent Kyrgyz media covering sanctions circumvention, and the coordinated placement of aligned messaging in EU and US publications together raise a serious question about the transnational financial repression nature and direction of this campaign.
This case follows a documented pattern. Authoritarian governments have learned to use European courts not to win on the merits, but to generate partial outcomes that can be repackaged as validation at home and deployed against the media and civil society organisations that hold them to account.
Call for Action
The World Liberty Congress calls on the European Commission to ensure that Belgium’s transposition of Directive 2024/1069 closes current gaps and offers genuine protection to civil society watchdogs, and on the Belgian legislature to accelerate this transposition. It further urges EU institutions to treat this case as a test of whether European legal infrastructure can be weaponised against the watchdogs the Union relies on to expose wrongdoing, and calls on the Council of Europe’s Committee of Ministers to use this case as a reference point when monitoring implementation of CM/Rec(2024)2 on SLAPPs, in particular its guidance on transnational SLAPPs and the misuse of commercial law to suppress public watchdog activity.
WLC calls on the PACE Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights, in the framework of its work on “Fighting back against transnational repression”, to endorse a pause/nonrecognition regime under which member states would not recognise, enforce or provide procedural assistance (including MLA) for any legal or quasijudicial requests from the perpetrator state and its proxies until judicial independence in that state is restored.
We stand with the Open Dialogue Foundation and will continue to report publicly on the development of these proceedings.
