Sviatlana Tsikhanovskaya’s interview to Intex-press recognized extremist

The inter­view con­tained infor­ma­tion aimed at incit­ing polit­i­cal, ide­o­log­i­cal, social hos­til­i­ty and dis­cord in soci­ety, the Pros­e­cu­tor Gen­er­al’s Office claims.

Intex-Press edi­tor-in-chief Uladz­imir Yanuke­vich was sum­moned to court as the own­er of the Intex-press web­site, which post­ed an elec­tron­ic ver­sion of the arti­cle. He was charged under part 5 of Arti­cle 23.5 of the Admin­is­tra­tive Code: dis­sem­i­na­tion by the own­er of an Inter­net resource that is not reg­is­tered as an online pub­li­ca­tion, of infor­ma­tion pro­hib­it­ed for dis­sem­i­na­tion on Inter­net resources by rel­e­vant leg­isla­tive acts.

Yanuke­vich was giv­en the max­i­mum pos­si­ble penal­ty – 20 basic val­ues (580 BYN).

In addi­tion, the Baranavichy inter­dis­trict pros­e­cu­tor issued an offi­cial warn­ing to the edi­tor about the inad­mis­si­bil­i­ty of repeat­ed vio­la­tions of mass media leg­is­la­tion.

Accord­ing to the ter­ri­to­r­i­al pros­e­cu­tor’s office, the court ruled to rec­og­nize the arti­cle pub­lished by Intex-press news­pa­per, as well as the text of the inter­view and its video record­ing post­ed on the web­site, extrem­ist mate­ri­als and allowed for imme­di­ate exe­cu­tion of the judge­ment.

A copy of the judge­ment has been sent to the Min­istry of Infor­ma­tion, for the inter­view and its video to be includ­ed in the Nation­al reg­is­ter of extrem­ist mate­ri­als. Besides that, this will restrict access to the web­site for ‘vio­lat­ing the pro­ce­dure for using the resource and post­ing infor­ma­tion, dis­sem­i­na­tion of which is pro­hib­it­ed by law’.

It also became known that «Belpochta» monop­oly chain refused to include ntex-Press in the sub­scrip­tion cat­a­log for the sec­ond half of the year, and retail chains have already refused to sell the news­pa­per.