Andrei Bastunets: “…the Ministry of Information ruins all efforts of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to patch up with the West”

The pub­lic access to ‘Charter’97’ Web-site has been blocked.

“It is the sec­ond attempt of offi­cial author­i­ties to block access to one of the most pop­u­lar Belaru­sian social and polit­i­cal Web-resources. And for the sec­ond time, we wit­ness com­plete­ly non­trans­par­ent actions of the Min­istry of Infor­ma­tion of Belarus,” not­ed Andrei Bas­tunets, Chair­per­son of Belaru­sian Asso­ci­a­tion of Jour­nal­ists.

“Like in the case with ‘Belaru­sian Par­ti­san’, it looks like the rea­son for block­ing access to this Web-resource was con­nect­ed with the users’ com­ments. How­ev­er, it is a shame to use the words ‘looks like’, when one of the fun­da­men­tal human rights and free­doms, i.e. the free­dom of expres­sion is restrict­ed,” he added.

“…the Min­istry of Infor­ma­tion ruins all efforts of the Min­istry of For­eign Affairs to patch up with the West in gen­er­al and Poland, in par­tic­u­lar,” said Andrei Bas­tunets.

“In my per­son­al opin­ion, the restric­tion of access to the ‘Belaru­sian Par­ti­san’ and ‘Charter’97’ shows that Belaru­sian author­i­ties are absolute­ly ready to apply cen­sor­ship and prac­tise it with­out hes­i­ta­tion regard­less of rea­sons. Only that I don’t know what events are pre­ced­ed by the actions this time,” con­clud­ed the Chair­per­son of Belaru­sian Asso­ci­a­tion of Jour­nal­ists.