Belarus: 18 journalists and bloggers arrested while covering mass protests

BAJ also report­ed that four of them — Kate­ri­na Bakhvala­va, Hali­na Abakunchyk, Siarhei Pia­trukhin and Dzmit­ry Har­bunou — were held overnight in a tem­po­rary deten­tion facil­i­ty. The fol­low­ing day the courts found Abakunchyk and Bakhvala­va guilty of breach­ing the admin­is­tra­tive law con­cern­ing free­lance jour­nal­ism and autho­ri­sa­tion to par­tic­i­pate in pub­lic events, a deci­sion which BAJ described as “unlaw­ful, ille­git­i­mate and sub­ject to rever­sal”.

In addi­tion, Siarhei Pia­trukhin and Dzmit­ry Har­bunou have been today sen­tenced to 15 days of admin­is­tra­tive arrest in Brest while jour­nal­ists Ana­tol Hatouchyts and Larysa Shchyrako­va have been sum­moned to the local police sta­tions to receive their writs to face charges in Homiel court.

Dur­ing the protests against the “law against social par­a­sites” last Sun­day, law enforce­ment agen­cies unfold­ed a large-scale oper­a­tion to pre­vent jour­nal­ists from cov­er­ing the events in cities like Orsha, Raha­chou, Viteb­sk and Brest. Police offi­cers ham­pered jour­nal­is­tic activ­i­ty under var­i­ous pre­texts includ­ing check­ing doc­u­ments, park­ing vio­la­tions, sus­pi­cion of dri­ving a stolen car, fail­ure to com­ply with the legit­i­mate demands of the police, vio­la­tion of media law, etc.

The “law against social par­a­sites” requires peo­ple who work less than 183 days a year to pay the gov­ern­ment $250 annu­al­ly. This would affect about 470,000 peo­ple in the coun­try of 10 mil­lion, accord­ing to the offi­cial esti­mates.

BAJ report­ed that more jour­nal­ists were detained on 12 March than dur­ing all the pre­vi­ous twelve months.

“The Belaru­sian Asso­ci­a­tion of Jour­nal­ists reminds that a jour­nal­ist is enti­tled to be present at mass events, in pub­lic places where social­ly impor­tant events are held and to trans­mit infor­ma­tion from there,” said the union in a state­ment. “Pros­e­cu­tion of jour­nal­ists for their fideli­ty to their pro­fes­sion­al duty is unac­cept­able.”

The IFJ backed BAJ in urg­ing the state bod­ies of the Repub­lic of Belarus to imme­di­ate­ly inves­ti­gate these mass vio­la­tions of jour­nal­ists’ rights, to iden­ti­fy the respon­si­ble and bring them to account. They fur­ther demand­ed the gov­ern­ment to take the nec­es­sary mea­sures to pre­vent sim­i­lar attacks and to appeal against court deci­sions to hold the jour­nal­ists admin­is­tra­tive­ly account­able for per­form­ing their pro­fes­sion­al duties.

“We join our Belaru­sian affil­i­ate and remind the nation­al author­i­ties that, accord­ing to their Con­sti­tu­tion, vio­la­tion of the rights of jour­nal­ists does not only unlaw­ful­ly restrict media free­dom but also infringes the con­sti­tu­tion­al rights of all cit­i­zens to dis­sem­i­nate their views and to receive infor­ma­tion,” said IFJ Gen­er­al Sec­re­tary, Antho­ny Bel­langer.