Mahiliou BAJ Condemns Police Practices

They protest­ed against unground­ed ill-treat­ment of jour­nal­ist Ali­na Skrabuno­va dur­ing her deten­tion.

May 21, 2018 the police detained the jour­nal­ist by force and took her to Lenin­s­ki dis­trict police depart­ment.  She man­aged to record the video of her deten­tion on her mobile phone.  As one can see from the video, the free­lance jour­nal­ist was detained by peo­ple in plain clothes. They did not give any expla­na­tions and did not iden­ti­fy them­selves. The car the two men used to detain Skrabuno­va was not marked as a police car. Mahil­iou BAJ believes this looks more like «kid­nap­ping» of a per­son, and does not resem­ble a legal deten­tion.

Lat­er it turned out the vio­lence against Skrabuno­va was orga­nized only to take her to the police sta­tion to hand her sum­mons for the court hear­ing on May 23.

«We, mem­bers of the Belaru­sian Asso­ci­a­tion of Jour­nal­ists express protest against unground­ed ill-teat­ment of our col­league. We con­sid­er the method cho­sen by the police for her deten­tion as an attempt to intim­i­date the jour­nal­is­tic com­mu­ni­ty, and we believe it nec­es­sary to state that it is unac­cept­able for a rule-of-law, demo­c­ra­t­ic state.»

The jour­nal­ists asked the local author­i­ties and the police depart­ment to explain what was the need for forcible deten­tion of Skrabuno­va. BAJ mem­bers demand that the police stop the prac­tice of such deten­tions in the future.

On May 23, Mahil­iou free­lance jour­nal­ists Ali­na Skrabuno­va and Yauhen Hlushk­ou  were sum­moned to Lenin­s­ki dis­trict police depart­ment of Mahil­iou. There they learned that they had been charged with ille­gal pro­duc­tion of media prod­ucts for Bel­sat TV.

Ali­na Skrabuno­va sub­mit­ted two com­plaints to the police on ille­gal actions of law enforce­ment offi­cers.

«The first com­plaint was about the inci­dent dur­ing the week­end, when unknown peo­ple, who intro­duced them­selves as police offi­cers, tried to burst into the apart­ment, when I was not there, and ques­tioned neigh­bors about me. The sec­ond com­plaint was about my deten­tion on on Mon­day, May 21. I had pre­vi­ous­ly talked with the local police offi­cer and we agreed that he would call me back on Tues­day. How­ev­er, they grabbed me in the dark hall­way, and behaved boor­ish­ly. That was not propo­er behav­ior for police offi­cers. Besides that, I want to know why the sec­ond per­son, who detained me togeth­er with local police offi­cer Marozau, did not iden­ti­fy him­self,» — Ali­na Skrabuno­va told BAJ.

Along with the charges to Ali­na, the police wrote up pro­to­cols against her col­league, free­lance cam­era­man Yauhen Hlushk­ou, for the same two sto­ries pro­duced for Bel­sat TV chan­nel.