Belarus Bans Propaganda of Suicide

The rul­ing also defines the view­ing time for movies 18+ from mid­night to 6 am; the rul­ing comes into effect on Feb­ru­ary 3, 2017.

From now on, prod­ucts with “calls for sui­cide”, “descrip­tion of means and meth­ods of sui­cide with the aim to stir deter­mi­na­tion to com­mit sui­cide”, “actions that indi­rect­ly encour­age sui­cide by means of jus­ti­fi­ca­tion and/or rea­son­ing for admis­si­bil­i­ty of sui­cide”, “promis­es of phys­i­cal and psy­cho­log­i­cal plea­sure”, “promis­es of ben­e­fits and advan­tages in case of sui­cide, also by means of games” are clas­si­fied and banned as “prop­a­gat­ing vio­lence and cru­el­ty”.

The rul­ing does not ban men­tion­ing facts of sui­cide and descrip­tion of means and meth­ods of sui­cide unless it encour­ages act­ing like­wise.

For decades, Belarus has been in the top of coun­tries with sui­cides per hun­dred thou­sand peo­ple, how­ev­er, the sta­tis­tics is improv­ing from 35 per­sons per 100 000 peo­ple in 2000 (2051 sui­cides) to 18 per­sons per 100 000 peo­ple in 2012. The drop in sui­cides for last 12 years is a ten­den­cy in all coun­tries neigh­bor­ing with Belarus: minus 48 per cent in Belarus, minus 44.4% in Rus­sia, minus 43.6% in Ukraine, minus 44.2% in Latvia, minus 10.5% in Poland.