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The State Department released their annual global human rights abuses report yesterday, and, somewhat astonishingly, everyone's favorite faux-Kazakh cultural ambassador makes a surprise appearance in a chapter devoted to Kazakhstan's offenses:

The 2006 report, released in Washington on Tuesday by U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, criticized the real Kazakhstan, a vast oil-producing Central Asian state, for increased restrictions on freedom of speech and other abuses. [...]

The report cited Borat's loss of his Kazakh webpage www.borat.kz in late 2005 alongside court cases and limits on free speech faced by the few domestic media critical of Kazakhstan's long-serving President Nursultan Nazarbayev.

"The government deemed as offensive the content of a satirical site controlled by British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen and revoked the .kz domain," the report said.

The report refers to events that occurred towards the end of 2005, well before the Borat movie phenomenon turned the sister-tonguing simpleton into a household name, when a special-ops force of mercenaries absconded with Borat.kz in the dead of night. (A group of Kazakh schoolchildren would later stumble upon its grisly remains, the pillowcase-hooded website floating face-down somewhere in the Tuolba River.) It was a political crime the current administration wouldn't soon forgive, and despite humoring diplomatic efforts with the Central Asian nation, they would ultimately vow to seek vengeance on behalf of the strange, mustachioed foreigner who won their hearts with his repeated, earnest efforts to personally reach out to the American premier.