News

Ales Bialiatski, Chairman of the Human Rights Center "Viasna" and Vice-President of the International Federation for Human Rights, together with Zhanna Litvina, ex-chair and Board member of the Belarusian Association of Journalists, have met in Brussels with Helga Schmid, Deputy Secretary General for the European External Action Service, and Stavros Lambrinidis, EU Special Representative for Human Rights, as well as a number of ambassadors of European countries to the European Union and other EU representatives in charge of human rights issues and European neighborhood policy.

Journalists filed a collective petition to the Ministry of Information and the General prosecutor’s office demanding to consider the incident of beating of Pavel Dabravolski, identify and bring to liability the policemen involved in the beating, and to take measure to prevent such incidents in future.

On January 25, the media reported that the criminal case against the journalist Aliaksandr Alesin had been suspended. It turned out that probably the case was suspended due to the fact that article 356.1, with which he had been charged (establishing cooperation with special services, security or intelligence services of a foreign state), was eliminated from the Criminal Code by the Law dated January 5, 2016.

Paul Dabravolski, a reporter working for the Belarusian news website TUT.BY was arrested and given a fine of 9.450.000 Belarusian rubles (420 EUR) for filming police beating two protesters during a court hearing on a graffiti case on 25 January. The European Federation of Journalists (EFJ) and the Belarusian Association of Journalists (BAJ) have today condemned the arrest and urged the authority to withdraw all charges against Dabravolski.

On January 26, the Board of BAJ made a statement concerning yesterday’s beating of Pavel Dabravolski, journalist of TUT.by, in the building of Frunzenski district court of Minsk.