Twenty years after the Soviet Union’s collapse, Kazakhstan joins Russia, Belarus and the Ukraine in abandoning its attempts to prop up exchange rates. Kazakhstan’s economic growth has screeched to a near halt – down to 1 percent from 10 percent, their central bank devaluing the tenge by 18 percent and their four biggest banks being seized as part of an emergency program that Bloomberg has reported is costing the equivalent to 20 percent of their gross domestic product.

According to BP Plc, Kazakhstan alone has 3.2 percent of the world’s oil reserves, yet they may soon be left with no choice but to appeal to the International Monetary Fund if their banks are indeed unable to repay foreign debt after the devaluation.

Nouriel Roubini, the New York University professor who forecast the U.S. recession two years ago, has been quoted as stating that “Kazakhstan looks like a small version of Iceland with its banks borrowing from abroad. A currency crisis becomes a banking crisis, it becomes a housing crisis, a sovereign-debt crisis, it becomes a corporate crisis because each one of these agents in these economies has a large amount of foreign liabilities.”

So if total economic meltdown is what can be expected in the near future, how is that going to impact the government’s already rocky record on human rights?

This is an important consideration for foreign investors, as many international oil and mining companies are eager to cling to their investments in Kazakhstan, and help the country recuperate from the crisis.  This forgiving approach occurs right alongside the enduring problem of human rights abuses, creating quite the headache for social responsibility policy planners.

The examples of political repression of the opposition are rife, and can potentially have an impact both on foreign business operations as well as the country’s efforts to recover from the economic crisis.  The Committee to Protect Journalists called today for the immediate release of Ramazan Yesergepov, editor of the independent Almaty-based weekly Alma-Ata Info, who was seized by security agents from his hospital bed a month ago. According to local press freedom advocates, the Kazakhstan Security Committee took Yesergepov from an Almaty hospital where he was being treated for high blood pressure, and have now placed him in a KNB detention center in Taraz, in southern Kazakhstan. He is currently being held without charge.

As Kazakhstan figures out how to recover from the crisis, there are many things that foreign investors need to keep in mind.  If the ruble falls, so too the tenge, and where journalists are not safe in daylight in Moscow, so too in Astana.  Given the prediction from Roubini, a lot of business will have to decide whether or not to get off this rollercoaster before it takes its big plunge.