The BAJ Chairperson Presented Expert Review of Draft Changes in Mass Media Law to Minister of Information

Dur­ing the meet­ing, A. Bas­tunets drew the minister’s atten­tion to the prob­lems, which had been men­tioned before. In par­tic­u­lar, it was not­ed that the draft changes were aimed at rein­forc­ing con­trol over the Inter­net in Belarus. Also, spe­cial con­cern was expressed by the draft legal norms, planned to be includ­ed into the Code of Admin­is­tra­tive Offens­es. To be pre­cise, the offi­cial author­i­ties would like to intro­duce new sanc­tions in the for­mat of fines, aimed at legal enti­ties, i.e. edi­to­ri­als for dis­trib­ut­ing the infor­ma­tion that is “banned for dis­sem­i­na­tion by oth­er leg­isla­tive acts”. A. Bas­tunets not­ed that such vague word­ing cre­ates oppor­tu­ni­ties for the abuse of this norm.

Also, the BAJ Chair­per­son dis­cussed with the Min­is­ter of Infor­ma­tion the prob­lem of imposed fines under arti­cle 22.9 of Belarus Code on Admin­is­tra­tive Offens­es.

Anoth­er empha­sis dur­ing the meet­ing was put on the recent ordi­nance on increas­ing the pres­ence of nation­al pro­grams on the state TV that should influ­ence the country’s infor­ma­tion­al secu­ri­ty.

“The major part of our talk was ded­i­cat­ed to the Inter­net. From my side, I not­ed that it was a pos­i­tive deci­sion to sev­er the Web-media from all oth­er Web-resources. How­ev­er, it will be pos­si­ble to obtain the sta­tus of ‘Web-media’ through a com­pli­cat­ed reg­is­tra­tion pro­ce­dure. And just on the con­trary, it is nec­es­sary to sim­pli­fy the reg­is­tra­tion rules. I cit­ed a thought, shared by Yury Ziss­er, the founder of TUT.BY Web-por­tal, which is the largest Web-resource in Belarus, that the require­ment to iden­ti­fy the users would result in their flee­ing to the Russ­ian Web-sites, where such restric­tions do not exist. Also, I passed our remarks, con­cern­ing the pro­posed amend­ments to the law ‘On Mass Media’, — not­ed Andrei Bas­tunets.

Accord­ing to the BAJ Chair­per­son, the Min­is­ter of Infor­ma­tion pro­posed to agree upon the for­mat of fur­ther dis­cus­sion of the above-men­tioned amend­ments to the Mass Media law. Also, he promised to inform the MP Andrei Nau­movich, who is the Head of the Stand­ing Com­mit­tee on Human Rights, Nation­al Rela­tions, and Mass Media, that the draft amend­ments were expect­ed to be received for revi­sion by experts at the Office of OSCE Rep­re­sen­ta­tive on Free­dom of the Media.