Belarusian bloggers under pressure

Blog­ger Siarhey Pya­trukhin was sup­posed to come to the Brest Inter­dis­trict Depart­ment of the Inves­tiga­tive Com­mit­tee on the morn­ing of July 23. It was report­ed that a crim­i­nal case had been opened against him. The case was ini­ti­at­ed under part 2 of Arti­cle 189 of the Crim­i­nal Code of Belarus (“Insult”). The sanc­tion of the arti­cle pro­vides for a fine, or cor­rec­tion­al labor for up to two years, or arrest, or restric­tion of free­dom for up to three years.

Pya­trukhin does not know who he insult­ed, but he does not doubt that this way the author­i­ties want to take revenge for his anti-cor­rup­tion inves­ti­ga­tions.

“I think this hap­pened due to my crit­i­cism of city and region­al author­i­ties and the police. And, most like­ly, it is about the police. I will now defend myself with a lawyer,” he said to belsat.eu.

Not so long ago, blog­ger Andrey Pavuk was also detained for coop­er­a­tion with Bel­sat. The blog­ger was told to come to the police and tes­ti­fy in the case of “pos­si­ble coop­er­a­tion with Bel­sat” via a text mes­sage. He refused to give an expla­na­tion.

In ear­ly July, Andrei Pavuk wore this shirt while ask­ing the local res­i­dents if it was offen­sive to wear images of offi­cials on clothes?

On Feb­ru­ary 22, the Min­sk police searched the flat of a pop­u­lar Belaru­sian videoblog­ger as part of the inves­ti­ga­tion of the crim­i­nal case under Art. 386 (‘insult­ing the pres­i­dent’).

19-year-old Stsya­pan Svy­at­lou [Svy­at­lou is an alias] has been vlog­ging about social and polit­i­cal life in Belarus on NEXTA Youtube chan­nel, which has over 100,000 sub­scribers.

At the moment Stsya­pan is abroad, he is a stu­dent of one of Poland’s uni­ver­si­ties.