Journalist Ales Liauchuk was Br 6 mln fined by Leninski district court in Brest (appr. $430). He is charged with illegal production and distribution of information (Part 2 of Article 22.9 of the Administrative Code) but de facto for contributing to a foreign mass medium without accreditation.
According to the journalist, judge Larysa Nazarenka was not considering any of his arguments. The sentence delivered was based on some document by the KGB saying that Ales Liauchuk was working for Belsat, he stressed.
“When I saw that it was a farce and no one was going to examine the case, I refused to answer questions and give evidence,” the journalist said.
It is the fourteenth sentence that has been delivered to an independent journalist in 2014. From year to year penalty amounts are increasing. Mr Liauchuk received the materials of his case and found a request of Leanid Tsupryk, a Deputy Head of Brest region executive committee asking to specify whether Mr Liauchuk is on the Foreign Ministry’s list of accredited foreign journalists. The answer in the negative was signed by Deputy foreign Minister Alena Kupchyna.
It is Mrs Kupchyna who denied accreditation to Belsat TV. The decision she sanctioned means that journalists are not allowed to work for the independent channel: as a result, Belsat journalists and contributors repeatedly draw fire from public officers.
In accordance with the Belarusian Law on Mass Media, a journalist is a person who works for a mass medium oficially registered in Belarus or, in case of mass media from abroad, has accreditation of the Belarusian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which means that freelance journalists are outlawed. They just fail to meet the definition of ‘journalist’.
In September, 2014 Dunja Mijatovic, Representative of the OSCE Office on Freedom of the Media, expressed concern with harassment of journalists and called on the Belarusian authorities not to create artificial obstacles to the activities of the press.
