On August 9, Belarus commemorates the sad anniversary of the 2020 presidential elections, which resulted in the fraudulent reelection of Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko. In the aftermath of the elections, Belarus experienced unprecedented levels of repression at the hands of the Lukashenko regime’s security services, with part of this violence targeting independent media and journalists.

In July, Belarus also marked the 30th anniversary of Lukashenko’s first election, in 1994. This anniversary served as a reminder of the fact that the Belarusian dictator has now been in power for over 30 years, with no end in sight to the repression against media and civil society carried out by authorities under his leadership over the past three decades.

While the mass protest movement in Belarus, in 2020 and 2021, took many by surprise at the time, and was widely reported on by European media, this attention almost completely faded in the past years, especially following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022.

However, Belarusian media, and civil society at large, continue to suffer from massive repression by local authorities. With nearly 40 journalists currently in prison according to monitoring by the Belarusian Association of Journalists, an independent trade union in exile, the scale of repression in Belarus is immense.

Moreover, the repression continues to escalate, with more and more independent media regularly  designated as “extremist” and banned in Belarus. Most worryingly, these designations foresee prison terms not only for journalists, but also for regular Belarusians who engage with independent media content.

In this context, despair could seem natural for independent Belarusian journalists, most of whom are in exile in neighboring Poland and Lithuania, as well as in Georgia and other European countries. However, these journalists continue their work despite obvious difficulties, managing to keep audiences despite access blocks and other bans in Belarus.

To discuss the present and future of Belarus and its independent journalists, IPI spoke to Natalia Radzina, the editor-in-chief of Charter’97, one of Belarus’s oldest and most popular online independent media outlets.

Guest: Natalia Radzina, Editor-in-Chief of Charter’97.

Producer and Host: Karol Łuczka, Eastern Europe Advocacy and Monitoring Officer at IPI.

Voice-over: Beatrice Choccioli, Europe Advocacy Officer at IPI.

Editor: Javier Luque, Head of Digital Communications at IPI.

Other episodes in this series:

Press freedom in peril: navigating elections and political turmoil in Poland, Slovakia and Bulgaria
Media Freedom in Focus: Untangling media capture in Greece
MFRR in Focus: Opposition wins Poland election

Related links:

Belarus: IPI condemns prison sentences for two more journalists
Serbia: MFRR partners demand Belgrade court set Belarusian journalist free
Belarus: IPI condemns prison sentences handed to two more journalists

This podcast series is part of the MFRR in Focus project sponsored by Media Freedom Rapid Response, which tracks, monitors and responds to violations of press and media freedom in EU Member States and Candidate Countries. The MFRR is organised by a consortium led by the European Centre for Press and Media Freedom (ECPMF) including ARTICLE 19 Europe, the European Federation of Journalists (EFJ), Free Press Unlimited (FPU), the International Press Institute (IPI) and CCI/Osservatorio Balcani e Caucaso Transeuropa (OBCT).

For more in-depth podcast episodes about the state of press freedom in Europe, visit the MFRR website or search MFRR In Focus on your podcasts apps. The MFRR is co-funded by the European Commission.