CEO describes blocking of Deutsche Welle’s website in Belarus as “act of desperation”

“The accu­sa­tions against DW are absolute­ly ridicu­lous. Mr. Lukashenko [Lukašen­ka] has shown that he will stop at noth­ing to main­tain his hold on pow­er in his strug­gle against his own peo­ple,” Mr. Lim­bourg said in a state­ment on Fri­day.

“The heavy use of inde­pen­dent news out­lets clear­ly shows that peo­ple in Belarus no longer trust the gov­ern­ment-con­trolled media,” he said. “We protest against the sus­pen­sion of our offer­ing because the peo­ple there have a right to objec­tive infor­ma­tion on the sit­u­a­tion in their coun­try.”

DW said in a press release on Fri­day that it had expand­ed its report­ing on Belarus since the spring of 2021 to cov­er the activ­i­ties of civ­il soci­ety in the coun­try.

It said that it had been work­ing to pro­vide solu­tions to cir­cum­vent cen­sor­ship and pro­vide rel­e­vant infor­ma­tion to peo­ple in many coun­tries world­wide.

On Octo­ber 28, three news web­sites were made inac­ces­si­ble to users in Belarus by order of the country’s infor­ma­tion min­istry. Apart from DW, the sites includ­ed those of Belarus’ news­pa­per Novy Čas and Cur­rent Time TV, a Russ­ian-lan­guage tele­vi­sion chan­nel launched by U.S.-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Lib­er­ty with par­tic­i­pa­tion of Voice of Amer­i­ca.

In an inter­view with the Belaru­sian government’s news agency BelTA, First Deputy Infor­ma­tion Min­is­ter Andrej Kunce­vič explained that the web­sites offered links to con­tent des­ig­nat­ed as “extrem­ist” by Belaru­sian courts.

He not­ed that such actions ran counter to Arti­cle 19 of the Anti-Extrem­ism Law and Arti­cle 38 of the Media Law.

Dozens of news web­sites have been blocked in Belarus fol­low­ing the August 2020 pres­i­den­tial elec­tion.