BAJ Activists Stand Up for Journalism

The Belaru­sian Asso­ci­a­tion of Jour­nal­ists con­sid­ers the prob­lem of per­se­cu­tion in rela­tion to free­lance jour­nal­ists, who con­tribute to for­eign media, to be among the most acute chal­lenges, faced by inde­pen­dent media work­ers in the coun­try. The reporters are sub­ject­ed to huge fines and intim­i­dat­ed with offi­cial warn­ings of gov­ern­men­tal struc­tures.

The Belaru­sian Asso­ci­a­tion of Jour­nal­ists invites our col­leagues to join the cam­paign either online or offline.

In par­tic­u­lar, it is pos­si­ble to put your­self in the per­se­cut­ed journalist’s shoes, tak­ing a pic­ture of your­self in the image of the impris­oned media work­er, who “print­ed arti­cles on for­eign Web-sites”, “appeared on for­eign TV and radio”, and got pun­ished for that. The spe­cial cam­paign pho­to-shield can be found at the BAJ Cen­tral Office (Kam­samol­skaya Str., 7–32, Min­sk).

Also, it is pos­si­ble to play the ‘Accred­i­ta­tion’ on-line game on the Web-site of BAJ.

A series of video-inter­views with the recent­ly pros­e­cut­ed jour­nal­ists, who con­tribute to for­eign media, can be found in a spe­cial sec­tion on the Web-site of BAJ.

The BAJ activists in the Belaru­sian regions joined the IFJ cam­paign. In par­tic­u­lar, inde­pen­dent media work­ers from Slonim, Viteb­sk, Brest, Mahilow, Hrod­na, Babruysk, Luninets, Hor­ki, Bia­lyn­ichy and oth­er cities of Belarus stood up for jour­nal­ism in their local cities and towns, either sup­port­ing the nation-wide cam­paign sce­nario or cre­at­ing their own ver­sions of local cam­paigns.