EX-PRESS.BY independent media deprived of domain name

Some time ago Mila Pali­ak, the own­er of the EX-PRESS.BY domain name, received an email from the Oper­a­tive Ana­lyt­i­cal Cen­ter under the Pres­i­dent of Belarus. It said that the site own­er was to con­firm the accu­ra­cy of the reg­is­tra­tion data with­in 7 days of receiv­ing the request. The con­fir­ma­tion should have been made in per­son in the company’s office.

Since the addressee did not respond to the notice with­in the spec­i­fied peri­od, this was con­sid­ered a vio­la­tion of the domain name reg­is­tra­tion pro­ce­dure.

On this gounds, the nation­al admin­is­tra­tor took the sole deci­sion to sus­pend the EX-PRESS.BY domain name reg­is­tra­tion with Mila Pali­ak.

In Octo­ber 2021 some con­tent of the EX-PRESS.BY media out­let were declared “extrem­ist” by the prosecutor’s office. In Feb­ru­ary 2023, for unknown rea­sons, the deci­sion was reit­er­at­ed in court, thus mak­ing the jour­nal­ists of the pub­li­ca­tion “dou­ble extrem­ists”.

In order not to put its staff at risk, the edi­to­r­i­al board decid­ed to “evac­u­ate” them from Belarus. This is the pri­ma­ry rea­son why per­son­al pres­ence in the registrar’s office is impos­si­ble. More­over, no piece of leg­is­la­tion stip­u­lates it.

The oth­er day the Belaru­sian Asso­ci­a­tion of Jour­nal­ists told a sim­i­lar sto­ry about can­cel­ing domain name reg­is­tra­tion of anoth­er inde­pen­dent edi­tion, alleged­ly because of a “failed data check”. The name of the media out­let has not yet been dis­closed, as its employ­ees in Belarus are under poten­tial threat.

Pre­vi­ous­ly the infor­ma­tion resource was rec­og­nized as an “extrem­ist for­ma­tion”, and it looked like the rad­i­cal mea­sures were con­nect­ed with this sta­tus. But it seems that the task of the con­trollers is to “opti­mize” all those who are dis­loy­al to the cur­rent regime.

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