On Thurs­day, free­lance pho­tog­ra­ph­er Tat­syana Kapi­ton­a­va was detained with­out charges by police as she cov­ered a con­fer­ence in Start­up Fam­i­ly cowork­ing cen­ter, in Min­sk. Judge Ale­na Zhukovich sen­tenced her to 10 days of admin­is­tra­tive deten­tion for “par­tic­i­pat­ing in an unau­tho­rised demon­stra­tion”.

On Wednes­day, police in Mohilev detained Deutsche Welle free­lance jour­nal­ist Alexan­der Burakov and Vladimir Lapt­se­vich of local inde­pen­dent TV chan­nel 6TV.

The Euro­pean Fed­er­a­tion of Jour­nal­ists (EFJ) joins its affil­i­ate in Belarus, the Belaru­sian Asso­ci­a­tion of Jour­nal­ists (BAJ), in denounc­ing these arbi­trary arrests.

“The OSCE Rep­re­sen­ta­tive on Free­dom of the Media’s appeal to the Belaru­sian author­i­ties on Thurs­day to review these tri­als and release the jour­nal­ists has had no effect,” said EFJ Gen­er­al Sec­re­tary Ricar­do Gutiér­rez. “On the con­trary, the Lukashenko regime is inten­si­fy­ing the repres­sion. We once again call on the inter­na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty to take con­crete action to stop the repeat­ed human rights vio­la­tions.”

Cur­rent­ly, 16 jour­nal­ists are deprived of their free­dom in Belarus:

• Kate­ri­na Andree­va

• Daria Chultso­va

• Kate­ri­na Bori­se­vich

• Julia Slut­skaya

• Alla Sharko

• Sergey Alshevsky

• Peter Slut­sky

• Kse­nia Lut­ski­na

• Andrey Alexan­drov

• Denis Ivashin

• Andrzej Poc­zobut

• Andrey Frol­ov

• Alexan­der Burakov

• Vladimir Lapt­se­vich

• Tat­syana Kapi­ton­a­va

• Lyubov Kasper­ovich

The EFJ and BAJ demand their imme­di­ate release.