Aksana Kolb, editor of Novy Chas newspaper, detained for 10 days

Accord­ing to the journalist’s rel­a­tives, a group of law enforcers with shields and sledge­ham­mers came to her apart­ment today. They said they were tak­ing the Novy Chas edi­tor for inter­ro­ga­tion by the Inves­tiga­tive Com­mit­tee.

Novy Chas is a Belaru­sian socio-polit­i­cal week­ly. It was found­ed by the Min­sk city orga­ni­za­tion of the Fran­cišak Skary­na Belaru­sian Lan­guage Soci­ety, the edi­to­r­i­al office is a suc­ces­sor of Zho­da news­pa­per. It was issued from March 2002.

In Novem­ber 2020, news­pa­per pho­tog­ra­phers were detained while cov­er­ing protests in Belarus. One of them, Yana Trusi­la, was detained twice and arrest­ed for a total of 28 days.

Pho­tog­ra­ph­er Dzmit­ry Dzmit­ry­jeu was also arrest­ed sev­er­al times. On 9 August 2020, he was arrest­ed while work­ing at a polling sta­tion where he wit­nessed the use of vio­lence. He was arrest­ed sev­er­al times in Octo­ber, and detained for 10 days in Novem­ber 2020.

On 5 August 2021, in the ear­ly morn­ing, the police came to Dzmitry’s house. The pho­tog­ra­ph­er was tak­en away for inter­ro­ga­tion and lat­er sen­tenced to 15 days of admin­is­tra­tive arrest for “defi­ance of police orders”.

On 12 March 2021, jour­nal­ist Dzia­n­is Ivashyn was detained. He is the author of a series of inves­tiga­tive arti­cles about for­mer Ukrain­ian SWAT unit offi­cers in Belarus. Ivashyn is charged under Arti­cle 365 of the Crim­i­nal Code (inter­fer­ence in the activ­i­ties of a police offi­cer). Lat­er Dzia­n­is was accused of trea­son against the state, he is in pre-tri­al deten­tion.

On 20 Octo­ber 2021, the police came to Novy Chas’ office and detained the edi­tor of the news­pa­per Aksana Kolb and deputy edi­tor-in-chief Siarhei Pul­sha. After search­es and inter­ro­ga­tions, the edi­tors were released.

On 14 Jan­u­ary 2021, it became known that Bel­sajuz­druk is can­cel­ing the dis­tri­b­u­tion agree­ment with the edi­to­r­i­al office. From that moment the news­pa­per was dis­trib­uted only by sub­scrip­tion. On 7 June 2021 Bel­posh­ta informed the edi­to­r­i­al office that the news­pa­per was exclud­ed from the sub­scrip­tion cat­a­log for the sec­ond half of the year. The edi­to­r­i­al office had to mail the news­pa­per to sub­scribers by them­selves. Novy Chas has not been pub­lished since August 2021. The site is blocked in Belarus but is acces­si­ble from abroad and via VPN.

25 media rep­re­sen­ta­tives are cur­rent­ly behind bars in Belarus 

«Новы час» чытае як мінімум тысяча зняволеных: размова з галоўнай рэдактаркай Аксанай Колб