Mass Media Week in Belarus Info-posting September 14 – October 4, 2015

On Sep­tem­ber 17, a jour­nal­ist from Mahilou Ali­ak­san­dr Burak­ou received a reply to his com­plaint he had left in the book of sug­ges­tions of the Lenin dis­trict admin­is­tra­tion in Mahilou. On August 21, an employ­ee made the jour­nal­ist delete pho­tos of the infor­ma­tion stands near the admin­is­tra­tion build­ing. The pre­text was that the jour­nal­ist was tak­ing pho­tos of the build­ing, where­as the lat­ter argued he just copied the infor­ma­tion on the stands. The reply says that the facts out­lined by the jour­nal­ist in his com­plaint were not con­firmed, and the actions of the employ­ee were law­ful. The jour­nal­ist stayed dis­ap­point­ed, says the offi­cials failed to refer to any law for­bid­ding him to pho­to­graph infor­ma­tion stands.

On Sep­tem­ber 22, the judge of the Hrod­na region court Mikalay Rachyn­s­ki upheld the fine imposed on Ales Dzian­isau and Ales Kirke­vich by the court of the Lenin dis­trict court of Hrod­na on August 19. The jour­nal­ists were fined 25 b.a. each under art. 22.9 for alleged­ly prepar­ing an ille­gal report about a doll exhi­bi­tion in Hrod­na, pub­lished on Bel­sat web­site.

On Sep­tem­ber 23, it became known that the region­al non-state news­pa­per Borisovskiye Novosti again received a refusal from the monop­o­lists Bel­posh­ta and Bel­sayuz­druk in reply to their appli­ca­tions for dis­tri­b­u­tion ser­vices. Both the state enter­pris­es dis­missed the request for ser­vices with excus­es that art. 391 of the Civ­il Code grants any phys­i­cal or legal enti­ty the free­dom in con­clud­ing con­tracts.

The inde­pen­dent news­pa­per has been out of the state dis­tri­b­u­tion sys­tems since 2006. The news­pa­per tem­porar­i­ly returned to sub­scrip­tion cat­a­logues in kiosks of the Min­sk region on June 1, 2013, but was left out five months lat­er.

 On Sep­tem­ber 23, the web­site of the cam­paign for obser­va­tion of the pres­i­den­tial elec­tions was sub­ject to DDoS attack. A coor­di­na­tor for the cam­paign Dzia­n­is Sadous­ki report­ed that the attack was con­duct­ed at around 1 am, but they failed to estab­lish from what coun­try. Two hours lat­er there was noticed an attempt of some­one to gain pass­words to the admin­is­tra­tion pan­el of the web­site. The attack failed, the web­site resort­ed to enhanced secu­ri­ty.

On Sep­tem­ber 29 it became known that Belaru­sian Embassy to Rus­sia had a meet­ing with man­agers of REN TV where it “firm­ly indi­cat­ed at the obvi­ous­ly neg­a­tive char­ac­ter” of a recent report about sex tourism in Belarus. The infor­ma­tion was giv­en by the Deputy Min­is­ter of For­eign Affairs Ale­na Kupchy­na. Accord­ing to the doc­u­ment dat­ed Sep­tem­ber 25, the Min­istry holds reg­u­lar mon­i­tor­ing of reports about Belarus in for­eign mass media.

As report­ed on Octo­ber 2, the repub­li­can enter­prise on con­trol of elec­tron­ic com­mu­ni­ca­tions Bel­GIE (Belaru­sian State Inspec­tion for Elec­tron­ic com­mu­ni­ca­tions) pub­lished a ten­der for the pur­chase of sys­tems reveal­ing anonymiz­ers in Inter­net access. The pur­chase is to be com­plet­ed and set to work by the end of Novem­ber 2015. A rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the com­pa­ny said the law oblig­ed them to detect anonymiz­ers, and they were doing it man­u­al­ly, but decid­ed to order a robot because there are thou­sands of anonymiz­ers. The enter­prise detects them, pub­lish­es the lists, and then providers block them.