RSF condemns raids on two independent Belarusian media outlets

At least four jour­nal­ists were tak­en into police cus­tody for ques­tion­ing: Tut.by edi­tor-in-chief Mary­na Zolata­va, Tut.by jour­nal­ists Han­na Kalty­hi­na and Hali­na Ulasik, and Bela­PAN reporter Tat­syana Kar­avyanko­va. Both media out­lets report­ed that fur­ther arrests were made in the after­noon

The police also searched Karavyankova’s coun­try home and the apart­ment of one of Tut.by’s edi­tors, Ulyana Babayed.

The Inves­tiga­tive Com­mit­tee accus­es peo­ple work­ing with these two media out­lets and the sci­en­tif­ic pub­lish­ing house Belarusskaya Nau­ka of ille­gal­ly access­ing the dis­patch­es of the gov­ern­ment news agency BelTA by using a subscriber’s account and pass­word. Access to BelTA’s dis­patch­es are reserved for sub­scribers for the first 15 min­utes after being post­ed online.

Staff mem­bers of the two media out­lets and of Belarusskaya Nau­ka are being inves­ti­gat­ed on a charge of “ille­gal­ly access­ing online infor­ma­tion,” which car­ries a pos­si­ble two-year jail sen­tence.

“These raids, which com­pro­mise the con­fi­den­tial­i­ty of jour­nal­is­tic sources, are out of all pro­por­tion to the charges,” said Johann Bihr, the head of RSF’s East­ern Europe and Cen­tral Asia desk. “It is hard to see them as any­thing oth­er that attempts to intim­i­date lead­ing inde­pen­dent media out­lets at a time of grow­ing harass­ment of crit­i­cal jour­nal­ists. We urge the Belaru­sian author­i­ties to allow these jour­nal­ists to work freely.”

“It’s a shame that the author­i­ties are using BelTA to pre­vent our inde­pen­dent news agency from doing its work,” Bela­PAN edi­tor-in-chief Iry­na Lew­shy­na told RSF. “Bela­PAN has legal­ly used BelTA infor­ma­tion avail­able in open access and always cit­ed it with ref­er­ences and hyper­links to the state agency’s orig­i­nal reports.”

She added that Bela­PAN had to use BelTA’s reports because it does not have the same access to offi­cial news about the pres­i­dent and gov­ern­men­tal agen­cies.

Ever since major anti-gov­ern­ment demon­stra­tions in the spring of 2017, the Belaru­sian author­i­ties have stepped up efforts to con­trol media cov­er­age, block­ing lead­ing news web­sites, adopt­ing an even more dra­con­ian media law and sub­ject­ing inde­pen­dent jour­nal­ists to an unprece­dent­ed wave of fines.

Belarus is ranked 155th out of 180 coun­tries in RSF’s 2018 World Press Free­dom Index.