Timur Kulibayev, who is married to a daughter of Nazarbayev, accused the outlets of defamation for publishing a letter accusing him of embezzling funds from a deal with China's national oil company.

But the newspapers say the ruling of the Almaty City Court, which warns them against publishing future information that could be viewed as damaging, is so broad that it effectively bars them from writing anything about him at all.

In its ruling, the court barred the newspapers from writing "any information which harms the honour and dignity of Timur Kulibayev."

"It's absolutely unclear... what information could harm the honour of Mr Kulibayev -- and who is going to define this," Igor Vinyavski, editor-in-chief of Russian-language newspaper Vzglyad, said at a press conference in Almaty.

"If tomorrow information appears in newspapers that Mr Kulibayev met with (Prime Minister) Masimov, and Kulibayev simply doesn't like that information, it could also be considered information which harms his honour," he added.

The ruling could be embarrassing for Kazakhstan, an energy-rich Central Asian state which on January 1 became the first ex-Soviet state to chair the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.

Rights groups have criticized the decision to grant Kazakhstan the rotating chairmanship of the body and object that the Central Asian country is far from meeting rights norms.

Kazakhstan has a dismal media-rights track record, ranking 142 out 175 countries on media watchdog Reporters Without Borders' annual worldwide press freedom index in 2009.

Last year Astana came under fire for a series of raids and court rulings against the Respublika weekly, whose editor-in-chief Tatyana Trubachova echoed Vinyavski's concerns at the press conference.

She mocked Kulibayev's citing of the constitution in his court filing, reading aloud from the Kazakh constitution, under which "every citizen has the right to freely receive and disseminate information," she said.

The country, ruled by Nazarbayev since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, promoted itself as a business-friendly democracy to win the OSCE chairmanship.

The case stems from a letter published by three independent newspapers -- Respublika, Vzglyad and Kursiv -- in which exiled Kazakh banker Mukhtar Ablyazov made claims that Kulibayev had pocketed the funds.

Ablyazov, a former chairman of leading Kazakh bank BTA who himself stands accused of embezzling billions of dollars during his time at the bank, made the accusations in a 61-page letter sent to Kazakh investigators and the media.

The letter details a complex web of transactions between 2003-2005 which supposedly prove that Kulibayev conspired with the China National Petroleum Company to manipulate stock sales to the tune of 165.9 million dollars (118.3 million euros).

A spokesman for Kulibayev, whose name is often mentioned as a possible successor to the 69-year-old Nazarbayev and is married to his daughter Dinara, could not immediately be reached for comment.

But the complaint filed with the court, a copy of which was obtained by AFP, demands that all electronic and print copies of the article be removed from circulation and asks that they be barred from besmirching him in the future.

Vinyavski said that his newspaper had made a good-faith effort to offer Kulibayev a forum to respond to the article in print, but that it had not been able to receive a rebuttal from him.

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