Zhanna Litvina about Situation with Human Rights in Belarus: ‘The Government Made Concessions, but Put Pressure on Journalists’

The BAJ Board mem­ber Zhan­na Litv­ina expressed her opin­ion dur­ing the forum that the Belaru­sian author­i­ties wouldn’t give up their con­trol over the whole soci­ety.

“There­fore, we won’t have less prob­lems, despite fac­ing a num­ber of signs of flex­i­bil­i­ty on the part of gov­ern­men­tal author­i­ties. The facts of flex­i­bil­i­ty include their par­tic­i­pa­tion in the pro­ce­dure of Uni­ver­sal Peri­od­ic Review, the Inter­de­part­men­tal Plan [on Human Rights – editor’s note], and the mere fact that Iosif Siaredzich, ‘Nar­o­d­naya Volya’ Edi­tor-in-chief had a meet­ing with the head of state that result­ed in the return of 9 inde­pen­dent peri­od­i­cals to the state-owned dis­tri­b­u­tion sys­tem after 11 years of exclu­sion. These are pos­i­tive events. How­ev­er, they can­not be regard­ed as signs of approx­i­ma­tion to demo­c­ra­t­ic trans­for­ma­tions. These are noth­ing but basic con­ces­sions,” Zhan­na Litv­ina said. 

The Time for Severe Challenges and Triumph

At the same time, Zhan­na Litv­ina drew atten­tion to the ‘incred­i­ble per­se­cu­tion of jour­nal­ists dur­ing the spring events’:

“There’s accept­ed the prac­tice of pre­vent­ing pro­fes­sion­al jour­nal­ists from prepar­ing infor­ma­tion releas­es and dis­sem­i­nat­ing them in the pub­lic sphere. There were reg­is­tered 123 cas­es of vio­la­tion of jour­nal­ist rights in March 2017. More than 100 jour­nal­ists were detained dur­ing 9 months since the year start. 10 of them were sen­tenced to up to 10 days of admin­is­tra­tive arrest. It would have been com­plete­ly unbear­able, if we didn’t have human rights orga­ni­za­tions with us. The spring time was full of severe chal­lenges and tri­umph for jour­nal­ism, since the jour­nal­is­tic com­mu­ni­ty felt that thou­sands of vis­its to Web-sites and the audi­ence growth brought them sat­is­fac­tion from being in the trade. Peo­ple were mak­ing life shields with their bod­ies for jour­nal­ists, defend­ed them from deten­tion dur­ing the actions,” added Zhan­na Litv­ina.

The Legal Norm on Accreditation Should Be Changed

Zhan­na Litv­ina drew the forum par­tic­i­pants’ atten­tion to the pros­e­cu­tion of jour­nal­ists for their coop­er­a­tion with for­eign media. 45 reporters have been fined for their work with­out accred­i­ta­tion since the year start.

“The sit­u­a­tion can be improved through changes in the leg­is­la­tion only. As for now, a free­lancer, a jour­nal­ist with­out accred­i­ta­tion is out­lawed. The author­i­ties do not treat them as human beings. This is an easy tar­get for law enforce­ment agen­cies. We can hard­ly cope with the sit­u­a­tion alone. There­fore, I call upon human rights defend­ers to sup­port our voice to intro­duce amend­ments to the Mass Media law,” Zhan­na Litv­ina not­ed.

The prob­lem with access to infor­ma­tion is sim­i­lar­ly acute accord­ing to the BAJ Board mem­ber. “We need a com­mon cam­paign in the soci­ety for the con­sti­tu­tion­al right of peo­ple to know what is hap­pen­ing in the coun­try, so that they could imple­ment their right to know the truth,” Zhan­na Litv­ina con­clud­ed.

Accord­ing to Zhan­na Litv­ina, inde­pen­dent jour­nal­ists were also shocked with the state­ment of the recent­ly appoint­ed Min­is­ter of Infor­ma­tion of Belarus Ali­ak­san­dr Kar­liuke­vich about the planned changes in the Mass Media Law on the intro­duc­tion of stricter reg­u­la­tion of infor­ma­tion flows on the Web and the intend­ed appli­ca­tion of these restric­tive norms in the field of social media.