BAJ to undergo examination by Ministry of Justice. Thousands of documents are to be presented in just 2 days

The Min­istry of Jus­tice wants to see mem­ber­ship lists, filed out mem­ber­ship appli­ca­tion forms, min­utes of all meet­ings of elect­ed bod­ies held since the begin­ning of 2018, all incom­ing and out­go­ing mes­sages dur­ing this peri­od, all finan­cial records, and more.

Remark­ably, the let­ter is dat­ed June 9, but arrived only today. Ini­tial­ly, it set today, June 21, as the dead­line for sub­mis­sion of the paper­work. Now the Min­istry’s rep­re­sen­ta­tive says they expect BAJ doc­u­ments to arrive by Wednes­day morn­ing, 23 June.

We have been act­ing accord­ing to the let­ter of law in all our activ­i­ties since the cre­ation of BAJ 25 years ago. How­ev­er, the require­ment to pro­vide a huge list of doc­u­ments in just 2 days is unre­al­is­tic. At the very least, because some of the request­ed doc­u­ments are still kept by the Inves­ti­ga­tion Com­mit­tee, after the search in the BAJ office on 16 Feb­ru­ary.

There­fore, the BAJ filed a com­plaint with the Min­is­ter of Jus­tice ask­ing for a rea­son­able time for pre­sent­ing the paper­work.

The Belaru­sian Asso­ci­a­tion of Jour­nal­ists unites over 1,300 jour­nal­ists, edi­tors, pho­tog­ra­phers, and pub­lish­ers. It is a mem­ber of the Inter­na­tion­al and Euro­pean Fed­er­a­tions of Jour­nal­ists.

For many years BAJ has been help­ing jour­nal­ists to defend their pro­fes­sion­al rights, and mon­i­tor­ing the sit­u­a­tion in the field of media in Belarus.