The International Press Institute (IPI) today joined international condemnation of Belarusian police’s Friday morning raid on independent broadcaster Belsat TV in Minsk that followed the station’s coverage of nationwide protests against a tax on the unemployed.
Authorities reportedly detained one employee, a videographer, and confiscated camera and audio equipment in the raid, which Belsat’s head of news programming argued was not related to trademark use, as authorities claimed, but retaliation for Belsat’s coverage.
The protests, which first erupted in February across multiple cities, came in response to a tax that penalises Belarusians who work for less than 183 days a year. Nicknamed the “social parasite tax”, it targets those who do not participate in “financing the state”.
According to the Belarusian Association of Journalists (BAJ), nearly 100 journalists across the country have reportedly faced detention in connection with attempts to cover the protests since they started.
Blasting the raid and the detentions, IPI Director of Advocacy and Communications Steven M. Ellis said “the massive crackdown on media to silence news of public discontent shows the degree to which the Lukashenko regime remains willing to stifle the exercise of fundamental freedoms, including the right to share and receive information”.
Although the tax was introduced in a 2015 presidential decree, news emerged earlier this year suggesting two new demographics would be targeted under the tax: Belarusians who had worked abroad for years and housewives with children under seven years old. That sparked growing attention to the tax and led to peaceful protests in major regional centres.
Authorities’ reaction was initially mild, with President Alexander Lukashenko allowing protestors to voice concern without fear of arrest and suspending collection of the tax until next year.
However, the protests continued to spread to smaller cities, so police began to detain opposition politicians and protest leaders just long enough to force them to miss major events. As protests continued, the circle widened, with authorities detaining prominent online activists, writers and journalists in multiple cities.
Andrei Bastunets, head of BAJ, said “the crucial point was March 12, when 18 journalists were detained”. In comparison, he noted, some 13 journalists were arrested in all of 2016. At that point, Bastunets said, the government began to detain activists and journalists en masse.
To date, BAJ has registered 93 journalists as having been detained during March, and 40 administrative cases as having been brought against journalists, mostly for illegally producing mass media products or participating in an unsanctioned event.
According to the group, all of the journalists detained were performing professional duties and some were even taken into custody before arriving at protests, having been detained by police at train stations. Many of those detained were released shortly, but some were ordered imprisoned for 10 to 15 days on March 27.
Charges against detained journalists included “violating the procedure for organising or holding a mass event”, “minor hooliganism” and “violating the procedure for production and distribution of mass media products”.
Bastunets, however, rejected the charges as “ungrounded and created to obstruct journalistic activities”, and he described a systematic deterioration in media freedom related to government efforts “to establish total control over [the] informational sphere”.
He noted that journalists in the country face potential criminal charges for defamation, that the Ministry of Information can shutter a media that receives two warnings of legal violations, even minor violations, and that freelance journalism is technically illegal.
“The March events only confirm the conclusions of BAJ, and human right defenders in general, that the situation, however stable it might look, can change for the worse at any moment with certain political predicaments or subjective response of the representatives of the government,” Bastunets commented.
