Belarusian propaganda’s crimes will be exposed and punished

The Belaru­sian Asso­ci­a­tion of Jour­nal­ists (BAJ) is launch­ing a new project that ana­lyzes the work of state pro­pa­gan­dists for poten­tial crim­i­nal offens­es.

“We are pre­serv­ing evi­dence of actions that fall under crim­i­nal offens­es, along with detailed case reviews and descrip­tions. All of this will, at the appro­pri­ate time, be sub­mit­ted to bod­ies autho­rized to con­sid­er such cas­es,” says BAJ Deputy Chair Aleh Aheyeu.

Aleh Aheyeu, Deputy Chair of the Belaru­sian Asso­ci­a­tion of Jour­nal­ists. Pho­to: BAJ

“The Crimes of Belaru­sian Pro­pa­gan­da” is a new ini­tia­tive by the Belaru­sian Asso­ci­a­tion of Jour­nal­ists in part­ner­ship with Media IQ, a Press Club Belarus project focused on devel­op­ing crit­i­cal think­ing in the dig­i­tal era and com­bat­ing fake news.

“We now have detailed descriptions and analyses of 16 cases”

“This project is ‘new’ in the sense that the joint­ly pre­pared mate­ri­als are now being made pub­lic. The work of our lawyers and mon­i­tor­ing team start­ed much ear­li­er,” Aheyeu told BAJ in an inter­view.

“A method­ol­o­gy was devel­oped to assess mate­ri­als pro­duced with­in the ecosys­tem of Belaru­sian state pro­pa­gan­da and dis­trib­uted through state-con­trolled media. Based on that method­ol­o­gy, we now have detailed descrip­tions and analy­ses of 16 cas­es — mate­ri­als pub­lished by pro­pa­gan­da out­lets in 2021–2022.”

This new sec­tion, “Crimes of Belaru­sian Pro­pa­gan­da,” is avail­able on the BAJ web­site under Media Law. It fea­tures mate­ri­als clas­si­fied as like­ly crim­i­nal acts and abus­es of free­dom of expres­sion, which should car­ry crim­i­nal lia­bil­i­ty.

Will the database be updated?

Yes, absolute­ly — new cas­es will be added. We will con­tin­ue this work and keep ana­lyz­ing mate­ri­als pub­lished by Belaru­sian pro­pa­gan­da out­lets to assess their com­pli­ance with the Crim­i­nal Code.

This is being done to ensure that actions by pro­pa­gan­dists in the pub­lic domain do not go unno­ticed or unpun­ished.

We are pre­serv­ing evi­dence of actions we believe con­sti­tute crimes. The descrip­tions of these cas­es will remain ready for sub­mis­sion to com­pe­tent author­i­ties empow­ered to con­sid­er such cas­es.

Why focus on 2021–2022?

This wasn’t an inten­tion­al­ly cho­sen peri­od. These 16 cas­es are not tied to spe­cif­ic date — they sim­ply stood out to those mon­i­tor­ing the infor­ma­tion space and to the lawyers ana­lyz­ing the mate­ri­als. I expect we will add cas­es from oth­er years after 2020; this is only the begin­ning.

“Anything that raises questions will be reviewed by lawyers”

So, if some­one notices some­thing out­ra­geous in a pro­pa­gan­da piece from a region­al news­pa­per or oth­er state media, can they flag it for the project team?

That’s right. We invite any­one con­cerned to col­lab­o­rate with us.

Pro­pa­gan­da mate­ri­als or links can be sent to BAJ’s offi­cial email office@baj.media with the note ‘Crimes of Pro­pa­gan­da’.”

Aleh Aheyeu. Pho­to: BAJ

We will review every­thing sub­mit­ted. And if lawyers find ele­ments of a crime, these cas­es will be added to our reg­istry. The BAJ mon­i­tor­ing ser­vice, which reg­u­lar­ly tracks pro­pa­gan­da out­put, will also con­tin­ue its work. Any­thing that rais­es legal con­cerns will be ana­lyzed using our method­ol­o­gy.

The work seems to be painstaking.

It is. It took sig­nif­i­cant time to devel­op the method­ol­o­gy. We had to incor­po­rate approach­es from inter­na­tion­al law to this cat­e­go­ry of crimes and con­sid­er the crim­i­nal leg­is­la­tion cur­rent­ly in force in Belarus. We ana­lyzed every­thing and aligned the stan­dards of Belaru­sian crim­i­nal law with those used in inter­na­tion­al law.

And, of course, ana­lyz­ing each case and deter­min­ing whether it con­tains ele­ments of a crime also takes sub­stan­tial time.

It appears to be work focused on long-term account­abil­i­ty and crime doc­u­men­ta­tion.

This is not just about future account­abil­i­ty and doc­u­ment­ing crimes. Pub­lic over­sight of the pro­pa­gan­da appa­ra­tus and the doc­u­men­ta­tion of its crimes should help reduce the hos­til­i­ty that clear­ly exists with­in Belaru­sian soci­ety. It should pre­vent pro­pa­gan­da from fuel­ing that hos­til­i­ty by demon­strat­ing that mon­i­tor­ing exists, evi­dence is being record­ed, and actions are being legal­ly assessed.

It’s only a mat­ter of time before these mate­ri­als reach author­i­ties capa­ble of review­ing crim­i­nal cas­es from the post-2020 peri­od.

This work should also influ­ence the present. Pro­pa­gan­dists must under­stand that when they inten­tion­al­ly com­mit crimes, there are peo­ple observ­ing, ana­lyz­ing, and build­ing a data­base. They need to know that crimes do not go unno­ticed and that they will be held account­able under the law.

Reg­istry of Alleged Crimes (RU)