Important news. Lukashenka ordered the Belarusian embassies to stop issuing passports. Another threat to colleagues

Until now Belaru­sian expats could get new pass­ports at the coun­try’s diplo­mat­ic mis­sions, but accord­ing to a decree pub­lished on Sep­tem­ber 4, they can only get a new pass­port or renew an old one in Belarus.

This means that Belaru­sians, and Belaru­sian jour­nal­ists in par­tic­u­lar, can no longer update their main doc­u­ment at their coun­try’s embassy. This means that polit­i­cal­ly active cit­i­zens of Belarus and inde­pen­dent jour­nal­ists who left to escape the Lukashen­ka regime will have their main doc­u­ment, a pass­port, expire from now on.

BAJ empha­sizes that this is a seri­ous prob­lem, since most EU coun­tries issue res­i­dence per­mits to for­eign­ers with a valid­i­ty peri­od until the expi­ra­tion date of the pass­port.

BAJ con­sid­ers it impor­tant to announce now the cre­ation of mech­a­nisms to pro­tect cit­i­zens of Belarus in this sit­u­a­tion in such coun­tries as Ger­many, the Czech Repub­lic and oth­ers.

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