CC BNP demands the release of Sergei Satsuk

Accord­ing to the infor­ma­tion from Siarhei Satsuk’s rel­a­tives and friends, he is charged with a crime pro­vid­ed for in part 2 of the arti­cle 430 of the crim­i­nal code of the Repub­lic of Belarus (receiv­ing bribes repeat­ed­ly or by extor­tion or by a group of peo­ple in col­lu­sion or in espe­cial­ly large size). The pun­ish­ment for this crime includes impris­on­ment from three to ten years.

Siarhei Sat­suk is known by the rep­re­sen­ta­tives of civ­il soci­ety as a jour­nal­ist of prin­ci­ple, com­mit­ted to his pro­fes­sion, who has been work­ing in inves­tiga­tive jour­nal­ism for many years despite unfavourable cir­cum­stances in the media in our coun­try. One of his lat­est major works is a series of mate­ri­als in the “Ezhed­nevnik” pub­lish­ing house on cor­rup­tion in the sys­tem of the Min­is­tery of Health of the Repub­lic of Belarus. After his work was pub­lished, numer­ous indi­vid­u­als men­tioned in the mate­ri­als were sen­tenced to impris­on­ment for cor­rup­tion offences.

These jour­nal­is­tic inves­ti­ga­tions of Siarhei Sat­suk caused a wave of adverse mate­ri­als about him in pub­lic sources of infor­ma­tion where the chief edi­tor of “Ezhed­nevnik” was accused of writ­ing arti­cles upon request.

Accord­ing to the inter­view which Siarhei Sat­suk gave to the “Ezhed­nevnik” web pub­lish­ing house in August 2019 and to the text which too was pub­lished on March 26, 2020 on the “Euro­pean Radio for Belarus” web­site, the jour­nal­ist was repeat­ed­ly threat­ened because of his jour­nal­is­tic activ­i­ty.

Giv­en this fact, the Coor­di­na­tion Com­mit­tee of the Belaru­sian Nation­al Plat­form of the East­ern Part­ner­ship Civ­il Soci­ety Forum express­es full sup­port to and sol­i­dar­i­ty with the State­ment of “The Belaru­sian Asso­ci­a­tion of Jour­nal­ists” on deten­tion of Siarhei Sat­suk dat­ed on 26 March 2020 and calls for the release of Siarhei Sat­suk and ter­mi­na­tion of crim­i­nal pros­e­cu­tion of him

Coor­di­na­tion Com­mit­tee of the Belaru­sian Nation­al Plat­form
 of the East­ern Part­ner­ship Civ­il Soci­ety Forum