International Conference on Media Challenges Held in Minsk

The con­fer­ence was ded­i­cat­ed to the issues of media leg­is­la­tion, stan­dards of jour­nal­ism and eco­nom­ic envi­ron­ment of media devel­op­ment. Invit­ed par­tic­i­pants of the con­fer­ence includ­ed Belaru­sian and for­eign media rep­re­sen­ta­tives, rep­re­sen­ta­tives of jour­nal­is­tic unions, as well as rep­re­sen­ta­tives of gov­ern­men­tal insti­tu­tions, such as the President’s Admin­is­tra­tion, two Min­istries, Par­lia­ment, Embassies, and the OSCE (it should be men­tioned here that most rep­re­sen­ta­tives of state insti­tu­tions ignored the invi­ta­tion).

The speak­ers were Andrei Bas­tunets (BAJ), Agne­ta Söder­berg (Fojo media Insti­tute, Swe­den), Aidar Bota­garov (Office of the OSCE Rep­re­sen­ta­tive on Free­dom of the Media), Ale­na Anisim and Han­na Kana­p­atskaya (mem­bers of Par­lia­ment, Belarus), Aleh Aheyeu (BAJ), Arif Aliyev (jour­nal­ists’ orga­ni­za­tion Yeni Nesil, Azer­bai­jan), Dainius Radze­vičius (the Jour­nal­ists’ Union of Lithua­nia), Boris Navasar­dian (Yere­van Press Club), Ole­na Gol­ub (Insti­tute of Mass Infor­ma­tion, Ukraine), Mikhail Yanchuk (BAJ).

“We want­ed to focus on major chal­lenges faced by the media in legal and eco­nom­ic spheres as well as issues in jour­nal­ism stan­dards. The main goal was to cre­ate a plat­form for dis­cus­sion between jour­nal­is­tic com­mu­ni­ty and rep­re­sen­ta­tives of state bod­ies and rep­re­sen­ta­tives of jour­nal­is­tic orga­ni­za­tions from oth­er coun­tries, in order to reflect on our stand­point, burn­ing issues and ways to solve them,” explains Andrei Bas­tunets, chair­per­son of BAJ.

In the sec­ond half of Feb­ru­ary 13, the Nobel Prize Lau­re­ate in lit­er­a­ture and hon­ored mem­ber of BAJ Svi­at­lana Alex­ievich spoke and answered ques­tions of the audi­ence, with online stream­ing of the dis­cus­sion (video in Russ­ian can be found here).