Two independent newspapers that were dropped from official distribution networks for criticising the government have signed contracts that will allow them to appear in the state postal monopoly Belpocha’s newspaper subscription catalogue and to be on sale in the state-owned Belsayuzdruk’s chain of newsstands. The two newspapers are weekly Narodnaya Volya and fortnightly Nasha Niva, Reporters sans...
President Alexander Lukashenko has signed a restrictive new media law which will allow authorities to further restrict press freedom in Belarus. The Belarusian parliament - before its adjournment in late June - rushed the bill through in three consecutive readings and passed it to the Constitutional Court for review. According to the local press, the court rubberstamped the bill in July and...
The adoption by the Belarus chamber of representatives of a media bill that would reinforce media registration procedures and, for the first time, extend media regulation to the Internet has free speech advocates a worried lot. The Belarus Association of Journalists (BAJ) had asked parliament’s human rights and media committee to examine whether articles 33 and 34 of the proposed new law violate...
The Belarusian foreign ministry’s has refused to issue accreditation to reporter Alyaksey Minchonak of Radio Racyja, a station based in the Polish city of Bialystok that broadcasts to Belarus. This latest obstacle for the station comes a month after the police raided its Minsk bureau and seized equipment, Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has reported. “The authorities are continuing to harass Radio...
Security police Thursday raided Belarussian broadcasters' offices and detained at least two reporters at their homes, Reuters has reported. The raids were launched two days after police broke up a rally by opponents of President Alexander Lukashenko and dozens of activists were fined or handed short jail terms. Zhanna Litvina, head of Belarus's Journalists' Association, told Reuters that the KGB...
The Belarus government has been making selective use of politically motivated civil libel lawsuits against critics. Intolerant officials punish what remains of Belarus’ independent media with lawsuits that result in exorbitant fines, further debilitating the outlets. Since 1999, the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has documented such targeted attacks against at least five
The Belarusian Supreme Court has ordered the early release of Aleksandr Sdvizhkov, former deputy editor of the now-shuttered independent newspaper Zgoda, who was sentenced in January to three years in a high-security prison for reprinting controversial Danish cartoons of the prophet Mohammed in 2006. “We’re relieved at the Belarusian Supreme Court’s decision to grant early release to Aleksandr...
The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) today called on Belarus’s Supreme Court to overturn a ruling that found Aliaksandar Zdzvizhkou, former deputy editor of Zhoda newspaper guilty of inciting religious hatred for re-printing the Danish caricatures of the prophet Mohammed in 2006. “This prosecution is an attack on press freedom that the government has tried to disguise by claiming...
The Board of the World Association of Newspapers has called on the government of Belarus to end the harassment of journalists and the repression of press freedom that exists in the country. "The past year has been marked by severe repression of press freedom in Belarus, which culminated at the time of the presidential elections in March 2006 when over 30 journalists where arrested. Even though all...
