Law enforcement bodies

A law enforcement agency (LEA) is any agency which enforces the law. This may be a local or state police, federal agencies such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) or the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). It could also refer to a national police force such as the Serious Organised Crime Agency. Also, it can be used to describe an international organization such as Europol or Interpol.

Law enforcement in Kazakhstan is handled by the Kazakhstan police and law courts, largely unchanged from the era of Soviet control, and is shared between the country's National Security Committee, Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Office of the Procurator General.

The police force itself comes under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, whereas the National Security Committee and the Procurator General's office are responsibly for intelligence gathering and investigation respectively. From 1992 Kazakhstan became a member of INTERPOL. Its law enforcement agencies are closely tied with those of Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan.

The court system in Kazakhstan operates at three levels, local, province, and supreme court, and operates under a system of guaranteed legal representation (similar to that of the United States of America). Together with these courts, and approval by the Procurator General's office, the Kazakhstan police are permitted to use invasive electronic surveillance, an act that has often been accused of being a violation of human rights, particularly by the United States.

Public administration

Public administration houses the implementation of government policy and an academic discipline that studies this implementation and that prepares civil servants for this work. As a "field of inquiry with a diverse scope" its "fundamental goal... is to advance management and policies so that government can function." Some of the various definitions which have been offered for the term are: "the management of public programs"; the "translation of politics into the reality that citizens see every day"; and "the study of government decision making, the analysis of the policies themselves, the various inputs that have produced them, and the inputs necessary to produce alternative policies."

Public administration is "centrally concerned with the organization of government policies and programmes as well as the behavior of officials (usually non-elected) formally responsible for their conduct" Many unelected public servants can be considered to be public administrators, including heads of city, county, regional, state and federal departments such as municipal budget directors, HRadministrators, city managers, Census managers, state [mental health]directors, and cabinet secretaries. Public administrators are public servants working in public departments and agencies, at all levels of government.