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  • Investigative Committee Detains Two Bloggers over Inciting National Hate (UPD)

    The Investigative Committee have initiated criminal cases under article 130 (inciting hatred) against Yury Paulavets and Dzmitry Alimkin, the official statement confirms on December 8.

    The crim­i­nal cas­es have been ini­ti­at­ed upon the appli­ca­tion of the Infor­ma­tion Min­istry, with the assess­ment of the blogs by the Nation­al Expert Com­mis­sion on Extrem­ism. The arti­cles con­cerned were pub­lished on web­sites Reg­num, Lenta.ru, EADai­ly and authored by Yury Paulavets (pen­names Mikalay Radau and Pavel Yuryntsau) and Dzmit­ry Alimkin (pen­name Alla Bron).

    The con­clu­sion of the Nation­al Com­mis­sion on Extrem­ism states that the mate­ri­als by the authors con­tain crime com­po­nents falling under arti­cle 130 of the Crim­i­nal Code (incit­ing racial, nation­al, reli­gious or oth­er social hatred).

    The Inves­tiga­tive Com­mit­tee held an inquiry and search­es, which led to estab­lish­ing the iden­ti­ties of the authors: Dmit­ry Alimkin is a res­i­dent of Brest, works as a guard, and Yury Paulavets is a res­i­dent of Min­sk, works as a uni­ver­si­ty teacher of polit­i­cal sci­ences. The Inves­tiga­tive Com­mit­tee has found evi­dence that the authors received roy­al­ties from a cit­i­zen of Belarus who resides in Moscow; the Inves­tiga­tive Com­mit­tee sup­pos­es that the authors act­ed from mer­ce­nary motives.

    The authors were detained on Decem­ber 5 – 6. The press ser­vice of the Inves­tiga­tive Com­mit­tee report­ed that the order­ing par­ty of the arti­cles was Regnum’s chief edi­tor Yury Baranchyk.

    Updat­ed with com­ments

    Nasha Niva report­ed that just before the deten­tion, on Decem­ber 1, the Min­is­ter of Infor­ma­tion Liliya Ananich sent a let­ter to Shvy­d­ki M., Spe­cial Rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the Russ­ian Pres­i­dent on inter­na­tion­al cul­tur­al coop­er­a­tion, say­ing that there had been observed the rise of “ten­den­tious”, “some­times destruc­tive” mate­ri­als in the Russ­ian media; “such mate­ri­als, doubt­ing sov­er­eign­ty and ter­ri­to­r­i­al integri­ty of Belarus, had appeared ear­li­er”; “there had been state­ments insult­ing Belaru­sian nation, his­to­ry, lan­guage and cul­ture”.

    In an inter­view to the Euro­ra­dio, the chair­per­son of BAJ Andrei Bas­tunets not­ed that, judg­ing from the arti­cles men­tioned in the let­ter, there is vio­la­tion of free­dom of speech of the detainees:  “You can find cer­tain vio­la­tions of law and of jour­nal­ist ethics, in some of these pub­li­ca­tions, not all of them. But I see no vio­la­tions regard­ing the Crim­i­nal Code. We observe dis­pro­por­tion­ate encroach­ment of the state on the free­dom of speech and free­dom of opin­ion” (full inter­view here in Belaru­sian).

    Blog: Андрей Бастунец: Некоторые соображения по поводу задержания «адептов русского мира»

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