Amendments to Internet Control Prepared Secretly from the Public

“We want the Inter­net to be con­trolled by some inter­na­tion­al orga­ni­za­tion accord­ing to cer­tain rules. If this is not the case, then every state will defend its own nation­al inter­ests inde­pen­dent­ly. Now Ananich and the oth­ers are deal­ing with this issue. They are to place the leg­isla­tive ini­tia­tives on my table,” said Ali­ak­san­dr Lukashn­ka.

The next day, the Belaru­sian Asso­ci­a­tion of Jour­nal­ists filed a request to the Min­istry of Infor­ma­tion ask­ing to reveal what the leg­isla­tive ini­tia­tives were about, and what norms reg­u­lat­ing the nation­al seg­ment of the Inter­net had to be amend­ed.

On May 16, the Min­istry of Infor­ma­tion sent their reply. The reply was not actu­al­ly a reply up to the point; the Min­is­ter answered that BAJ’s request “had been tak­en into account”.

Andrei Bas­tunets, chair­per­son of BAJ and lawyer, says that the reac­tion not sim­ply vio­lates the law (con­cern­ing cit­i­zen peti­tion­ing to pub­lic bod­ies), but also reminds the sit­u­a­tion around amend­ments that were intro­duced to the Law on Mass Media at the end of 2014.

“In 2014, BAJ also sent sev­er­al requests to state bod­ies ask­ing about the amend­ments being devel­oped. At that time, we had the reply from the Min­istry of Infor­ma­tion that in case such amend­ments were pre­pared, the jour­nal­ist com­mu­ni­ty would be invit­ed for pub­lic dis­cus­sion of the draft.

But the promise was not ful­filled, and the amend­ments were made pub­lic on the day they were approved by the Par­lia­ment. The present sit­u­a­tion reminds of that of 2014, it shows that Belaru­sian Min­istries do not reply specif­i­cal­ly to ques­tions posed in cit­i­zen peti­tions.  We won’t leave the sit­u­a­tion as such, we will lodge appeals,” said the chair­per­son of BAJ.