Journalists and human rights defenders are not extremists. BAJ considers it absurd that the organization was recognized as «extremist». STATEMENT

It is report­ed that the deci­sion on this was made on Feb­ru­ary 28. And 3 days lat­er, the author­i­ties hand­ed down a shame­ful ver­dict in the Vias­na case.

BAJ was found­ed in 1995 and has been work­ing for more than 27 years to sup­port truth­ful jour­nal­ism in Belarus, qual­i­ty media, and the pro­tec­tion of the rights of their col­leagues.

Dur­ing this time, BAJ has become a world-famous orga­ni­za­tion, a mem­ber of the Inter­na­tion­al and Euro­pean Fed­er­a­tion of Jour­nal­ists, a lau­re­ate of the Euro­pean Par­lia­men­t’s Sakharov Prize for Free­dom of Thought and many oth­er world awards.

Even after BAJ was dis­solved by the author­i­ties, the orga­ni­za­tion was award­ed the UNESCO World Prize in 2022 and sev­er­al oth­er awards attest­ing to the recog­ni­tion of the orga­ni­za­tion’s activ­i­ties by the inter­na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty. Belaru­sian Nobel lau­re­ates, Svi­at­lana Alex­ievich and Ales Biali­ats­ki, both are BAJ mem­bers.

After the sec­ond search, which was in fact a pogrom, in the office of the orga­ni­za­tion in 2021, BAJ lead­ers were forced to leave Belarus. In August 2021, the Supreme Court decid­ed to dis­solve the orga­ni­za­tion (with­out even cre­at­ing a dis­so­lu­tion com­mis­sion, which clear­ly indi­cates the qual­i­ty of the court deci­sion), depriv­ing 1300 BAJ mem­bers and col­leagues of the real­iza­tion of the right of asso­ci­a­tion.

But the Belaru­sian Asso­ci­a­tion of Jour­nal­ists is not an entry in the reg­is­ter of legal enti­ties, but a com­mu­ni­ty of pro­fes­sion­als and like-mind­ed peo­ple work­ing for one goal: to make high-qual­i­ty truth­ful media, to give objec­tive infor­ma­tion to soci­ety, to pro­tect the right to free­dom of expres­sion.

The deci­sion of the KGB of Belarus is a new man­i­fes­ta­tion of the author­i­ties’ pres­sure on Belaru­sian peri­od­i­cals and jour­nal­ists aimed at intim­i­da­tion and repres­sion in order to stop the work of inde­pen­dent media, which is cru­cial for soci­ety.

The Belaru­sian Asso­ci­a­tion of Jour­nal­ists thanks all friends and col­leagues for their sup­port.

We will con­tin­ue to pay max­i­mum atten­tion to the safe­ty of our col­leagues and the pro­tec­tion of our com­mu­ni­ca­tions — and we con­tin­ue to work to achieve the mis­sion of the orga­ni­za­tion: expand­ing the space for free­dom of speech through the sup­port of high-qual­i­ty jour­nal­ism demand­ed in mod­ern soci­ety and the dis­sem­i­na­tion of truth­ful infor­ma­tion.