Investigative Committee Detains Two Bloggers over Inciting National Hate (UPD)

The crim­i­nal cas­es have been ini­ti­at­ed upon the appli­ca­tion of the Infor­ma­tion Min­istry, with the assess­ment of the blogs by the Nation­al Expert Com­mis­sion on Extrem­ism. The arti­cles con­cerned were pub­lished on web­sites Reg­num, Lenta.ru, EADai­ly and authored by Yury Paulavets (pen­names Mikalay Radau and Pavel Yuryntsau) and Dzmit­ry Alimkin (pen­name Alla Bron).

The con­clu­sion of the Nation­al Com­mis­sion on Extrem­ism states that the mate­ri­als by the authors con­tain crime com­po­nents falling under arti­cle 130 of the Crim­i­nal Code (incit­ing racial, nation­al, reli­gious or oth­er social hatred).

The Inves­tiga­tive Com­mit­tee held an inquiry and search­es, which led to estab­lish­ing the iden­ti­ties of the authors: Dmit­ry Alimkin is a res­i­dent of Brest, works as a guard, and Yury Paulavets is a res­i­dent of Min­sk, works as a uni­ver­si­ty teacher of polit­i­cal sci­ences. The Inves­tiga­tive Com­mit­tee has found evi­dence that the authors received roy­al­ties from a cit­i­zen of Belarus who resides in Moscow; the Inves­tiga­tive Com­mit­tee sup­pos­es that the authors act­ed from mer­ce­nary motives.

The authors were detained on Decem­ber 5 – 6. The press ser­vice of the Inves­tiga­tive Com­mit­tee report­ed that the order­ing par­ty of the arti­cles was Regnum’s chief edi­tor Yury Baranchyk.

Updat­ed with com­ments

Nasha Niva report­ed that just before the deten­tion, on Decem­ber 1, the Min­is­ter of Infor­ma­tion Liliya Ananich sent a let­ter to Shvy­d­ki M., Spe­cial Rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the Russ­ian Pres­i­dent on inter­na­tion­al cul­tur­al coop­er­a­tion, say­ing that there had been observed the rise of “ten­den­tious”, “some­times destruc­tive” mate­ri­als in the Russ­ian media; “such mate­ri­als, doubt­ing sov­er­eign­ty and ter­ri­to­r­i­al integri­ty of Belarus, had appeared ear­li­er”; “there had been state­ments insult­ing Belaru­sian nation, his­to­ry, lan­guage and cul­ture”.

In an inter­view to the Euro­ra­dio, the chair­per­son of BAJ Andrei Bas­tunets not­ed that, judg­ing from the arti­cles men­tioned in the let­ter, there is vio­la­tion of free­dom of speech of the detainees:  “You can find cer­tain vio­la­tions of law and of jour­nal­ist ethics, in some of these pub­li­ca­tions, not all of them. But I see no vio­la­tions regard­ing the Crim­i­nal Code. We observe dis­pro­por­tion­ate encroach­ment of the state on the free­dom of speech and free­dom of opin­ion” (full inter­view here in Belaru­sian).

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