Reporter Gets Moral Damage Compensation for Unlawful Imprisonment in KGB

Then, almost four years ago, the ted­dy bears were bumped on a town of Ivianets from a plane that ille­gal­ly crossed the air­space of Belarus. The team of Swedish PR agency Stu­dio Total got away with penal­ty for their stunt.

Anton Surapin was arrest­ed after he was first to pub­lish the pho­tos of the ted­dy bears on his web­site BNP.by. The arrest sparked a huge out­cry and a wave of sol­i­dar­i­ty among jour­nal­ists. A month lat­er, he was set free under recog­ni­zance not to leave Belarus. In June 2013, almost a year lat­er, the case was closed.

The jour­nal­ist says he planned to sue the inves­ti­ga­tors for the unlaw­ful deten­tion, but he could not obtain all nec­es­sary doc­u­ments and mean­while lost one year while serv­ing in the army. Upon return, with the help of BAJ lawyers, he sub­mit­ted his suit to court demand­ing 190 mil­lion rubles com­pen­sa­tion. The defen­dant, the Min­istry of Finances, motioned to close dis­miss the law­suit. How­ev­er, on March 2, 2016, the Mask­ous­ki dis­trict court of Min­sk ruled to pay the jour­nal­ist the moral dam­age of 8 mil­lion rubles. Straight­away, the defen­dant appealed against the pay­ment, and the jour­nal­ist appealed against the deci­sion claim­ing the sum was too small.

“The appeal court upheld the ini­tial deci­sion, and now the Min­istry of Finances is to pay me those 8 mil­lion rubles of moral com­pen­sa­tion. Gen­er­al­ly, I am sat­is­fied, as this has been the first prece­dent in years when a per­son, who had been rec­og­nized a polit­i­cal pris­on­er by the inter­na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty, suc­ceed­ed in his claim for com­pen­sa­tion,” says Anton Surapin.

“Now I have two options: to appeal to the Supreme Court to increase the sum of com­pen­sa­tion, because 8 mil­lion rubles (around 400$) for a month of arrest and a year under recog­ni­zance is incom­pa­ra­ble. Anoth­er option is to lodge an appeal to the Gen­er­al prosecutor’s office to make the KGB offi­cial­ly bring apolo­gies for the sto­ry. Also, I thank BAJ and per­son­al­ly to Aleh Aheyeu for pro­fes­sion­al legal sup­port,” he added.