Andrei Bastunets: ‘The Dialogue with the EU Continues, but Problems with Freedom of Speech Remain to be Unsolved’

The role, the con­tent, and the form of par­tic­i­pa­tion of civ­il soci­ety in dif­fer­ent for­mats on var­i­ous com­mu­ni­ca­tion plat­forms of Belarus – EU rela­tions and their even­tu­al con­tri­bu­tion to meet­ing the prac­ti­cal objec­tives of Euro­pean Part­ner­ship were dis­cussed dur­ing the con­fer­ence of Belaru­sian Nation­al Plat­form of EP Civ­il Soci­ety Forum.

‘Par­al­lel process­es take place at the same time, unfor­tu­nate­ly, includ­ing the dis­cus­sion of sit­u­a­tion with human rights among the civ­il soci­ety actors in the coun­try and the state process, aimed at con­ceal­ing the prob­lems,’ not­ed Andrei Bas­tunets dur­ing his speech at the con­fer­ence.

As an exam­ple of inef­fec­tive talks, Bas­tunets pre­sent­ed a dia­logue on human rights that includ­ed dis­cus­sion of such top­ics as arbi­trary deten­tion of jour­nal­ists and fines for jour­nal­ist work with­out accred­i­ta­tion. 

‘There was a peri­od of time since April 2016 till March 2017, when it looked like the talks had some pos­i­tive results, since jour­nal­ists weren’t fined for their work for for­eign media with­out accred­i­ta­tion then,’ — not­ed A. Bas­tunets. – ‘How­ev­er, the sit­u­a­tion aggra­vat­ed con­sid­er­ably since March 2017, and the num­ber of fines last year exceed­ed the total num­ber of fines in the pre­vi­ous three years. It proves the fact that one group of gov­ern­men­tal offi­cials often deals with the dia­logue, and the oth­er group of gov­ern­men­tal offi­cials deals with deci­sion mak­ing,’ added the Chair­per­son of Belaru­sian Asso­ci­a­tion of Jour­nal­ists.

The final res­o­lu­tion was adopt­ed by the con­fer­ence par­tic­i­pants at the end of the event. Among oth­er, it was focused on the cur­rent prob­lems in the Belaru­sian mass media field:  ‘We under­score the unac­cept­abil­i­ty of the reg­u­lar facts of pres­sure on the inde­pen­dent media and jour­nal­ists. We sup­port the assess­ment of the sit­u­a­tion with free­dom of speech in our coun­try rep­re­sent­ed in the recent state­ments of the Belaru­sian Asso­ci­a­tion of Jour­nal­ists and a group of human rights orga­ni­za­tions about the inad­mis­si­bil­i­ty of restrict­ing pub­lic access to web­sites ‘Belaru­sian Par­ti­san’ (belaruspartisan.org) and ‘Char­ter 97’ (charter97.org). Also, we call upon the offi­cial author­i­ties to can­cel the rel­e­vant deci­sions of the Min­istry of Infor­ma­tion and restore access to these Web-sites as well as to review the exist­ing leg­is­la­tion on the media and put an end to the prac­tice of polit­i­cal cen­sor­ship on the Inter­net, and per­se­cu­tion of jour­nal­ists for the con­duct of their pro­fes­sion­al duties, «- not­ed the con­fer­ence par­tic­i­pants.