Mass Media Week in Belarus Info-posting January 5 – 11, 2015

On Jan­u­ary 6 in the Cen­tral dis­trict court of Min­sk rel­a­tives of a charged man attacked jour­nal­ists who want­ed to take pic­tures of the court­room and of the charged per­son dur­ing break time.

Judge Mikhail Khoma banned record­ing and tak­ing pic­tures dur­ing the pro­ceed­ings. How­ev­er, noth­ing was told about break time, so a jour­nal­ist switched on a video cam­era, but was unable to record because the rel­a­tives start­ed to inter­rupt and shield the lens. Anoth­er cor­re­spon­dent, Aleh Hruzdzilovich from Radio Svabo­da, tried to record this inci­dent and was attacked ver­bal­ly too; the rel­a­tives grabbed his dic­ta­phone and threw out.

The tri­al had been scan­dalous, the court of first instance found the man guilty of beat­ing and inflict­ing seri­ous health dam­age to a homo­sex­u­al.

On Jan­u­ary 6, the domain onliner.by was tak­en back to the reg­is­ter of the nation­al domain zone. Before that, the com­pa­ny elim­i­nat­ed all vio­la­tions of trade leg­is­la­tion revealed ear­li­er by an inspec­tion of the Trade Min­istry.

We remind that onliner.by, atop retail trade and news por­tal, was removed from the BY domain zone by Oper­a­tive Ana­lyt­i­cal Cen­ter under the aus­pices of the pres­i­den­ton Decem­ber 20upon request of the Trade Min­istry.

On Jan­u­ary 8, the Hrod­na region­al court dis­missed the appeal of Andrei Mialesh­ka, BAJ mem­ber. The jour­nal­ist want­ed to over­turn a fine imposed on him on Decem­ber 2 by the Lenin dis­trict court of Hrod­na (judge Yury Kaza­ke­vich) for work for a Belaru­sian Radio Racy­ja with­out accred­i­ta­tion (admin­is­tra­tive art. 22.9).

The jour­nal­ist thinks his right to pro­fes­sion is vio­lat­ed for polit­i­cal rea­sons, and will appeal fur­ther.

On Jan­u­ary 9, the Eco­nom­ic Court in Min­sk imposed a fine of 5 mil­lion rubles and con­fis­ca­tion of 961 mil­lion rubles from Lohv­in­au book­store. The suit was filed by the Infor­ma­tion Min­istry in Decem­ber. The book­store was charged with sell­ing books with­out Reg­is­tra­tion of the Infor­ma­tion Min­istry. Lohv­in­au book­store had applied for reg­is­tra­tion at least six times, but all appli­ca­tions end­ed with refusals. The book­seller has to pay a fine for that he is an unreg­is­tered book­seller, the sum equiv­a­lent to around 363 USD for the time being. But, the state also wants a com­pen­sa­tion of 961 mil­lion rubles of the “ille­gal prof­it”, which is around 70,000 EURO for the time being. Lohv­in­au says the state bod­ies mis­tak­en about the sum of the prof­it, as this is the annu­al turnover. The defen­dant made a motion to attach finan­cial doc­u­ments prov­ing it to the case mate­ri­als, but the judge dis­missed the motion. The book­seller appeals against the deci­sion.

On Jan­u­ary 10, a month after the release from the KGB deten­tion cen­ter, Ali­ak­san­dr Alesin gave an inter­view to the press ser­vice of BAJ telling his case was going on and he was peri­od­i­cal­ly sum­moned to ques­tion­ings. “…the ques­tions are all the same, I am ques­tioned about some details that have already been explained… Any exam­i­na­tion will show that my mate­ri­als are based on open sources, so this is fruit­less,” he said.

We remind that Ali­ak­san­dr Alesin, jour­nal­ist of Belorusy I Rynok, mil­i­tary affairs ana­lyst, was detained on Novem­ber 25. Infor­ma­tion about the deten­tion and the place of deten­tion became known to the pub­lic only at the begin­ning of Decem­ber.

On Decem­ber 8, his rel­a­tives announced that he had been accused of trea­son (arti­cle 356 of the Crim­i­nal Code) and coop­er­a­tion with spe­cial ser­vices or inves­tiga­tive bod­ies of anoth­er state (arti­cle 356.1). On Decem­ber 10, the jour­nal­ist was release dun­der recog­ni­zance not to leave the coun­try. He said that the charges of trea­son had been dropped; cur­rent­ly he is accused of coop­er­a­tion with for­eign spe­cial ser­vices.