A Court in Pinsk Fires Two Bloggers For Online Broadcast On YouTube and Facebook

As the press ser­vice of the Belaru­sian Asso­ci­a­tion of Jour­nal­ists learned, the police had drawn up a report on the basis of a state­ment by Alexan­der Yunke­vich, the in-house lawyer of EXIDE, a com­pa­ny based in Pin­sk.

Alexan­der Yunke­vich demand­ed to pros­e­cute the blog­gers Sergei Pya­trukhin and Alexan­der Kabanau for the videos they had post­ed online and that had been filmed at the entrance to the company’s premis­es in Pin­sk. Accord­ing to the lawyer of EXIDE, by hav­ing done so, Pya­trukhin and Kabanau vio­lat­ed the law on mass media.

Part 2 of Arti­cle 22.9 of the Admin­is­tra­tive Code does stip­u­late that an «ille­gal pro­duc­tion and (or) dis­tri­b­u­tion of media prod­ucts» con­sti­tutes a vio­la­tion. How­ev­er, there is noth­ing there to affirm that this respon­si­bil­i­ty extends to pri­vate pages on social net­works (for exam­ple, YouTube or Face­book ).

Accord­ing to Alexan­der Kabanau, he indeed shot a video for his per­son­al account on Face­book at the company’s entrance in Pin­sk, while Sergei Pya­trukhin did a «live» broad­cast on its own YouTube chan­nel.

As a result, the judge found that the blog­gers’ video broad­cast should be con­sid­ered media prod­ucts and fined Alexan­der Kabanau and Sergei Pya­trukhin for 40 base amounts (over EUR 400) each. The blog­gers imme­di­ate­ly announced their inten­tion to appeal the rul­ing, as they find it to be absurd and in con­tra­dic­tion with the Belaru­sian law.

Human rights activist Pavel Sapiel­ka shares this opin­ion. In his com­ments to the press ser­vice of the Belaru­sian Asso­ci­a­tion of Jour­nal­ists, he also stressed that the court rul­ing once again demon­strat­ed the exis­tence of pros­e­cu­tion for the dis­sem­i­na­tion of infor­ma­tion in Belarus; this sit­u­a­tion is not in line with the country’s inter­na­tion­al oblig­a­tions in the field of human rights.