Belsat journalists to lose car and property if they don’t pay fines

On July 13, Yana Vasyuk, the court offi­cer of the Depart­ment of Forced Exe­cu­tion of the Dzyarzhyn­sk Dis­trict, came to the jour­nal­ists of Bel­sat Vol­ha Cza­jczyc and Andrei Kozel.

“They took stock of our phone, and they took all the mon­ey from our wal­lets. They also took inven­to­ry of the car and took a note that we would not sell it and do not break it. Now we are crim­i­nal­ly respon­si­ble for the safe­ty of our things. The house in which we are reg­is­tered belongs to Andrei’s moth­er — that’s why Yana Vasyuk said that she needs to con­tact the social ser­vices: how do chil­dren live in a sit­u­a­tion when we do not have prop­er­ty?” said Vol­ha Cza­jczyc.

Just this year the Belaru­sian courts imposed a total of 12 fines on Vol­ha and Andrei (our col­leagues have to pay almost 9,000 BYN to the state). The rea­son for the per­se­cu­tion of jour­nal­ists is pro­fes­sion­al activ­i­ty. All cas­es were ini­ti­at­ed under Arti­cle 22.9 of the Code of Admin­is­tra­tive Offens­es — “pro­duc­tion or dis­tri­b­u­tion of media mate­ri­als”.

“If we do not pay the fine with­in two weeks, this prop­er­ty will be tak­en away. They also said that they would think about what to take away from us to cov­er the fines,” Vol­ha added.

Vol­ha and Andrei have not paid a sin­gle fine in 2018.

Last year, jour­nal­ists of Bel­sat paid fines for over $ 25,000. Prob­a­bly the cur­rent amount of fines will become even greater: only for the first 6 months of this year the judges imposed more than BYN 46,253 on jour­nal­ists of TV chan­nel.