Reinforcement of Repression against Independent Journalists in Homiel

The journalist’s video footage was ded­i­cat­ed to street music per­form­ers and a pup­pet show in Homiel.
The police dis­re­gard­ed the fact that the jour­nal­ist had a press card of ‘Novy Chas’ news­pa­per cor­re­spon­dent with her.

Yury Hrad, a police inspec­tor from Chy­hu­nach­ny City Dis­trict Depart­ment of Inter­nal Affairs not­ed in his report that the jour­nal­ist had ‘pub­lished’ her video footage in a pro­gram of ‘Bel­sat’ TVchan­nel from Poland. Two more police reports were drawn up in rela­tion to anoth­er free­lance jour­nal­ist from Homiel Larysa Shchyrako­va, who con­tributed video mate­ri­als to the ‘Bel­sat’ TV chan­nel.

One video sto­ry was ded­i­cat­ed to the prob­lems of ‘Asaut­sy’ auto-mar­ket in Homiel. And the sec­ond video report dwelt upon the efforts of local gov­ern­men­tal author­i­ties to build new blocks of flats in the quar­ters of already exist­ing res­i­den­tial areas and the con­se­quent local dwellers’ protest actions in the sec­ond largest city in Belarus. 

The police reports were pro­duced in the Savi­et­s­ki and Chy­hu­nach­ny City Dis­tict Depart­ments of Inter­nal Affairs in Homiel.
“The pres­sure on inde­pen­dent jour­nal­ists per­sists”, not­ed Larysa Shchyrako­va. “It looks like the law enforce­ment agen­cies make free­lancers leave the pro­fes­sion…

Per­son­al­ly, I still have strength to resist the pres­sure. Also, I feel sol­i­dar­i­ty and sup­port on the part of my col­leagues and heroes of my pub­li­ca­tions. The lat­ter under­score the social impor­tance and use­ful­ness of my work. Actu­al­ly, I believe it’s my moral duty to col­lect and dis­sem­i­nate non-biased and truth­ful infor­ma­tion”, the jour­nal­ist added.

It’s worth men­tion­ing that since the begin­ning of 2017, the total sum of fines, imposed on the free­lance jour­nal­ist Larysa Shchyrako­va for her work has amount­ed to 3381 Belaru­sian rubles (around EUR 1470).