Searches In Press Club Office, Employees Are Detained For 72 Hours

Pho­to cred­it: Press Club Belarus

Attor­ney lawyer Siarhei Zikrats­ki was pushed out of Alla Sharko’s apart­ment dur­ing the search. He remained to wait in the entry­way.

The police also detained jour­nal­ists: Nasha Niva deputy chief edi­tor Andrei Skurko, Onlin­er reporter Tat­siana Ashurke­vich, and Belarusy i Rynok jour­nal­ist Anton Mardzilovich near Alla Sharko’s apart­ment. They were tak­en to Mask­ous­ki dis­trict police police depart­ment for a doc­u­ment check and then released.  It seems that the police detained the jour­nal­ists in order to take Alla away with­out wit­ness­es.

She was tak­en to the Finan­cial Inves­ti­ga­tion Depart­ment on Kalvaryiskaya street. .

«The Depart­ment of finan­cial inves­ti­ga­tions of the State Con­trol Com­mit­tee is con­duct­ing a check on vio­la­tion of the tax law by staff of the Press Club and oth­er enti­ties that are involved, among oth­er things, into receipt of large sums of mon­ey from abroad», — BELTA was told by the press ser­vice of the State Con­trol Com­mit­tee.

On Decem­ber 22, For­eign Min­is­ter Uladz­imir Makei spoke about Belarus response to the EU sanc­tions, includ­ing the plans to lim­it the activ­i­ties of a num­ber of polit­i­cal foun­da­tions, which oper­ate under the aus­pices of for­eign embassies. Is it a coin­ci­dence that the police arrests the Press Club lead­er­ship the same day?

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Yulia Slut­skaya — founder and chair of  Press Club Belarus. She’s been involved in jour­nal­ism since 1994. She grad­u­at­ed from the Phi­los­o­phy Fac­ul­ty of the Belaru­sian State Uni­ver­si­ty, and worked as a soci­ol­o­gist before join­ing the media sphere. In 1995–2006 Yulia served as the chief edi­tor of «Kom­so­mol­skaya Prav­da in Belarus». In 2007–2010 she led the Euro­pean Radio for Belarus, and in 2011 she found­ed and led Belarus in Focus Infor­ma­tion Office in War­saw.