Draconic Draft Amendments to Mass Media Law: Registration of On-line Periodical Editions, Identification of Commentators, Blocking of Social Media

Here is a list of main issues, which are pro­posed to be changed in the Mass Media law:

- The draft bill envis­ages the already exist­ing vol­un­tary reg­is­tra­tion of on-line resources as mass media (to be named ‘Web edi­tions’). The reg­is­tered on-line media out­lets and their employ­ees will be grant­ed the rights of tra­di­tion­al mass media in the slight­ly abridged for­mat. All oth­er Web-sites will also be able to work. How­ev­er, they won’t be regard­ed as mass media in this case.

Sur­pris­ing­ly enough, it is planned to extend the chap­ters of the law on oblig­a­tions and respon­si­bil­i­ty of mass media to all Web-resources in the coun­try.

- The offi­cial reg­is­tra­tion of Web-resources as mass media, i.e. Web-edi­tions will be con­duct­ed in the com­mon tra­di­tion­al way for all media in Belarus. In par­tic­u­lar, it is sug­gest­ed that edi­to­r­i­al offices of such Web-edi­tions will be locat­ed in admin­is­tra­tive, non-res­i­den­tial premis­es only. The edi­tors-in-chief of such Web-edi­tions should have 5 years of work expe­ri­ence on man­age­r­i­al posi­tions in mass media etc.

- The own­ers of non-reg­is­tered on-line resources won’t be able to accred­it their cor­re­spon­dents at gov­ern­men­tal and oth­er offi­cial insti­tu­tions;

- The jour­nal­ist sta­tus of employ­ees of such non-reg­is­tered Web-resources will be con­test­ed. It means that the cor­re­spon­dents of such Web-resources won’t be able to enjoy com­mon jour­nal­ist rights, while imple­ment­ing their pro­fes­sion­al duties at mass pub­lic actions, while defend­ing their infor­ma­tion sources etc. How­ev­er, they will be legal­ly liable for their actions in accor­dance with the mass media law at that.

- As before, it will be pos­si­ble to restrict access to Web-resources extra­ju­di­cial­ly. The reg­is­tered ‘Web-edi­tions’ may be deprived of their offi­cial reg­is­tra­tion for being blocked at that. None of court deci­sions are need­ed, either. 

- There will be intro­duced oblig­a­tory iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of peo­ple, who post mate­ri­als on any Web-resource, com­ment on-line, or take part in forum dis­cus­sions.

- The draft law envis­ages oblig­a­tory mod­er­a­tion of on-line resources, since oth­er­wise they can be blocked.

- The draft law pro­vides for a pos­si­bil­i­ty of block­ing access to social media, ‘if it is tech­ni­cal­ly impos­si­ble to imple­ment a deci­sion on restrict­ing pub­lic access to a con­stituent part of a Web-resource’.

- The draft law keeps the sim­pli­fied way of restrict­ing access to on-line resources with­out warn­ings from the Min­istry of Infor­ma­tion of Belarus and intro­duces sup­ple­men­tary grounds for that. In par­tic­u­lar, a Web-resource can be blocked for imple­ment­ing the activ­i­ty that is banned by leg­is­la­tion of Belarus.

- The draft law pro­vides for a pos­si­bil­i­ty of restor­ing access to the banned on-line resources by means of address­ing to the Min­istry of Infor­ma­tion of Belarus. The min­is­te­r­i­al deci­sion can­not be appealed in court at that.

— The sug­gest­ed legal amend­ments are aimed at strength­en­ing con­trol over the online-field of Belarus, not­ed Andrei Bas­tunets, Chair­per­son of Belaru­sian Asso­ci­a­tion of Jour­nal­ists.

The Belaru­sian Asso­ci­a­tion of Jour­nal­ists is plan­ning to sub­mit crit­i­cal remarks about the legal draft to the Cham­ber of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives of the Nation­al Assem­bly of Belarus until April 9, 2018.

The full text of the draft law can be found HERE.