Wins and Fails of 2016, the legal side

Last year legal assis­tance was pro­vid­ed in two main direc­tions: legal defense of jour­nal­ists and pro­mo­tion of basic human rights in the sphere of free expres­sion.

Major vic­to­ries

The case of Anton Surapin: the jour­nal­ist once held by the KGB for a month for pub­lish­ing a pho­to of ted­dy bears dropped from a tres­pass­er air­plane, won the law­suit to get com­pen­sa­tion for ille­gal deten­tion.

The case of Eduard Palchys: BAJ has not tak­en part direct­ly in the process, though coop­er­at­ed in sev­er­al legal actions. Any­way, the case deserves men­tion­ing as a fea­ture of great sol­i­dar­i­ty among jour­nal­ists. The blog­ger John Sil­ver, who had gone undis­guised and pros­e­cut­ed for alleged­ly incit­ing nation­al hatred, was found guilty, but was released in court.

In spring, final­ly the author­i­ties stopped pros­e­cut­ing free­lance jour­nal­ists for con­tribut­ing to for­eign media with­out accred­i­ta­tion, accord­ing to admin­is­tra­tive arti­cle 22.9. The last tri­al of the kind took place in April 2016. Nation­al court dis­missed all appeals and argu­ments; for the time being, two com­plaints have been lodged to the UN Human Rights Com­mit­tee for the vio­la­tion of the rights of cit­i­zens Larysa Shchyrako­va and Kas­tus Zhuk­ous­ki to gath­er and dis­sem­i­nate infor­ma­tion freely.

An inter­est­ing case occurred in Babruysk, when the police want­ed to bring to lia­bil­i­ty a jour­nal­ist of Bobruyskij Couri­er for alleged­ly tak­ing part in an unsanc­tioned pick­et that they cov­ered. Luck­i­ly, the jour­nal­ists proved their inno­cence with legal meth­ods.

Fail­ures

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, there were fail­ures as well. At the begin­ning, there were 10 fines imposed on jour­nal­ists for con­tribut­ing to for­eign mass media with­out accred­i­ta­tion.

The most out­ra­geous inci­dent was when the police beat a jour­nal­ist of TUT.by right in the build­ing of court; no one was held liable for that.

The law­suit of a dairy farm against Asso­ci­at­ed Press reporter has kept the pub­lic stunned since April 2016; the case is not over, the reporter is still appeal­ing against the ver­dict.

On the pos­i­tive side, state bod­ies were prone to coop­er­ate with BAJ last year: for exam­ple, BAJ chair­per­son and lawyer Andrei Bas­tunets took part in the work of the Media Obser­va­tion Board of the Cen­tral Elec­toral Com­mis­sion han­dling media dis­putes in elec­toral cam­paign­ing (there were par­lia­men­tary elec­tions in Belarus in Sep­tem­ber 2016).

Besides, some rec­om­men­da­tions and indi­ca­tors sug­gest­ed by BAJ to the Uni­ver­sal Peri­od­ic Review of the UN were added to the inter­a­gency plan adopt­ed by the gov­ern­ment to imple­ment the rec­om­men­da­tions.

Anoth­er vast sphere of activ­i­ties dealt with enlight­en­ing activ­i­ties for jour­nal­ists: edu­ca­tion­al events, sem­i­nars, legal exam­i­na­tion of texts, etc. With all this, we hope, we get the decrease of deten­tions and arrests – for instance, there were only 13 deten­tions last year.

Plans for 2017

In 2017, we are plan­ning to shift from direct defense of jour­nal­ists under repres­sions to enhanc­ing free speech space.

We defined sev­er­al promis­ing direc­tions to change the sit­u­a­tion at the legal lev­el: for exam­ple, devel­op­ing amend­ments to mass media leg­is­la­tion, ensur­ing access to infor­ma­tion for jour­nal­ists, and encour­ag­ing changes in law enforce­ment prac­tice.