H.E. Aleksandr Lukashenko
President
Office of the President
Minsk
Republic of Belarus

Fax: +375 17 222 35 03

Vienna, 28 June 2004

Your Excellency,

The International Press Institute (IPI), the global network of editors, media executives and leading journalists in over 120 countries, strongly condemns the expulsion by the Belarusian authorities of the Ukrainian freelance journalist Mikhail Podoliak on 21 June 2004.

According to information before IPI, Podoliak, a regular contributor to the Minsk-based independent newspaper, Vremya, was deported for allegedly trying to “destabilise” the political situation in Belarus in articles on the political and economic policies of the government. The articles were described as containing defamatory allegations.

On 21 June, members of the state security services burst into Podoliak’s home and, after presenting an expulsion order, gave him fifteen minutes to pack his belongings. He was then escorted to the train station and put on a train to the Ukrainian border. Podoliak, who was barred from entering Belarus for the next five years, has no apparent right of appeal against the decision.

This is not the first time that foreign journalists have been expelled from Belarus. Two correspondents from the Russian television company, NTV, Alexander Stupnikov and Pavel Selin, were expelled from Belarus in 1997 and 2003, respectively.

IPI views Podoliak’s expulsion as another in a long series of recent acts by the authorities aimed at stifling critical voices in the media. The opposition weekly, Rabochaya Solidarnost, was suspended for three months on 3 June, and the private newspaper, Narodnaya volya, was ordered to pay 50 million roubles (US$ 23,000) in damages – a sum that could force the newspaper into insolvency – for libelling Yahor Rybakou, former chief of the Belarusian State Television and Radio Company.

Moreover, IPI considers the measures taken against Podoliak as a gross violation of everyone’s right to “seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers,” as contained in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

IPI urges the relevant authorities to repeal the sentence against Podoliak and to allow him to return to Belarus to continue working and rejoin his wife, Irina, who is a Belarusian citizen.

We thank you for your attention.

Yours sincerely,

Johann P. Fritz
Director