News

On Monday, March 22, Masty reporter of Hazeta Slonimskaya Yazep Palubiatka was summoned for questioning by the police. He entered the police station at 11 a.m. He did not return home that day.

Bastunets was questioned as a witness on the morning of March 16, again. After that some of the seized items were returned.  "They returned only some of the documents — those that were in the safe box, including employment records, and statutory documents," -- Bastunets said.

The deputy chairman of the Belarusian Association of Journalists will be interrogated at the Central Office of the Investigative Committee as a witness in a criminal case on March 24.

Dzianis Ivashyn is the 11th journalist under arrest in Belarus. He was arrested on the evening of Friday 12 March in Grodno, in the west of the country. The European Federation of Journalists (EFJ) joins its Belarusian affiliate, the Belarusian Association of Journalists (BAJ), in calling for his immediate release and that of the other ten journalists detained in Belarus.

Nasha Niva’s photographer Nadezhda Buzhan became one of the finalists of the 2021 World Press Photo international photo contest. Her photo shows Olga Severinets waiting for her husband, politician Pavel Severinets, outside a notorious detention centre on Okrestin Street.

As of March 11, Ihar Bancer [Igor Bantser] has been on a dry hunger strike for eight days. Ihar announced the hunger strike at a court session on March 3 expressing his protest and disagreement with the accusations of Hooliganism that he is facing and that he calls unfair. Ihar has been in prison since October 20, 2020. The musician's relatives and friends believe that one of his unrelated street performances could have been the likely reason for his arrest.

Belarus’ human rights situation has deteriorated further in recent weeks. The European Federation of Journalists (EFJ) believes this deterioration should be viewed in the context of the grave and systemic human rights violations the authorities committed in the run-up to the 2020 fraudulent presidential election and in its aftermath, for which there has been no accountability. The EFJ joins Amnesty International, the International Federation for Human Rights and Article19 in demanding action by the UN Human Rights Council to establish a new mechanism assisting the process of accountability for human rights violations in Belarus.

In response to today’s sentencing of Belarusian journalist Katsiaryna Barysevich to six months in jail and a fine over her coverage of protests in the country, the Committee to Protect Journalists issued the following statement: