The EU leadership, together with the EU member states, is working on the fifth package of sanctions against the Belarusian regime amid the current migration crisis egged on by Alyaksandr Lukashenka and his cronies.
At Thursday’s meeting of the EP’s Committee on Foreign Affairs, Luc Devigne, Managing Director for Europe and Central Asia of the European External Action Service (EEAS), said the new package would focus on judges and prosecutors involved in the crackdown on the Belarusian people.
During the hearings in the European Parliament, there were proposals to include in the sanctions list Belarus’ national carrier Belavia which is now banned from flying to the EU in order to complicate its access to financial resources. In addition, the idea to blacklist Belarusian travel companies that promote illegal migration was vioced.
Officials from Latvia and Lithuania, with the support of an MEP from Poland, also suggested developing a special ‘toolkit’ to counter hybrid attacks. However, none of them specified what tools it might have.
The bloc is also trying to get help from migrants’ countries of origin. After the successful negotiations Iraq, Brussels also began a dialogue with Turkey and African countries.
The previous restrictive measures against the Belarusian regime were introduced by the Council of the EU in order to respond to the escalation of serious human rights violations in Belarus and the violent repression of civil society, democratic opposition and journalists, as well as to the forced landing of a Ryanair flight in Minsk on 23 May 2021 and the related detention of journalist Raman Pratasevich and his companion Sofia Sapega.
belsat.eu
