Amendments to Media Law Likely to Be Passed in June DOCUMENT

BAJ chair­per­son, lawyer Andrei Bas­tunets iden­ti­fies the key points con­sid­ered by the work­ing group.

- From the con­ver­sa­tions with Work­ing Group mem­bers, I could expect two key points to be tak­en into account: intro­duc­tion of the judi­cial pro­ce­dure to appeal against Min­istry’s of Infor­ma­tion deci­sions on block­ing of online resources, and a sim­pler reg­is­tra­tion pro­ce­dure for online media.

My expec­ta­tions came true halfway — the amend­ments envis­age an oppor­tu­ni­ty to chal­lenge the Min­istry’s deci­sion in court, but the reg­is­tra­tion pro­ce­dure remains com­pli­cat­ed and dif­fi­cult. For exam­ple, it says that only legal enti­ties are eli­gi­ble to be defined as «edi­to­r­i­al teams», unlike indi­vid­ual entre­pre­neurs or nat­ur­al per­sons.

This is a sig­nif­i­cant obsta­cle for enter­ing the media mar­ket.

Up to now, Belarus Inter­net resources have not reg­is­tered as media, and their sta­tus was not legal­ly defined. The amend­ments intro­duce vol­un­tary reg­is­tra­tion, but not every­one will be eli­gi­ble to do it.

For exam­ple, the pop­u­lar region­al resources media-polesye.by and ex-press.by are found­ed by indi­vid­ual entre­pre­neurs. Accord­ing­ly, if they want to have the appro­pri­ate sta­tus, own­ers would need to cre­ate and reg­is­ter a legal enti­ty, and then apply for reg­is­tra­tion of their online resources to the Min­istry of Infor­ma­tion.

At first glance, the amend­ments dropped the issues of lia­bil­i­ty of online resources — there was a pro­pos­al to intro­duce addi­tion­al lia­bil­i­ty of Inter­net resource own­ers of 200–500 base val­ues to the Admin­is­tra­tive Code. These pro­vi­sions have been dropped from the bill, but it’s too ear­ly to cel­e­brate, as we heard they have been moved to a dif­fer­ent bill — on amend­ments to the Admin­is­tra­tive Code.  Most impor­tant­ly, the pro­vi­sion has not dis­ap­peared, but is being under active devel­op­ment.

All the oth­er issues under­scored by BAJ and rep­re­sen­ta­tives of Belarus media com­mu­ni­ty have gone ulti­mate­ly unheed­ed.

The whole dis­cus­sion of the bill seemed more like a sim­u­la­tion than an attempt to find com­mon ground.

The bill still envis­ages respon­si­bil­i­ty of edi­to­r­i­al teams to mon­i­tor the con­tent of com­ments, manda­to­ry iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of online com­men­ta­tors and extra-judi­cial pos­si­bil­i­ties for the Min­istry of Infor­ma­tion to block online resources. Main­ly, the bill has kept almost all the painful aspects high­light­ed by the media com­mu­ni­ty, includ­ing BAJ.

Also, nei­ther the Min­istry of infor­ma­tion, nor the Cham­ber of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives, as far as we know, engaged inter­na­tion­al experts in work­ing on the amend­ments, although the OSCE rep­re­sen­ta­tives have expressed inter­est.

BAJ received the bill amend­ing the media law, pre­pared for the sec­ond read­ing by the Cham­ber of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives , from MP Han­na Kana­p­atskaya.

Accord­ing to the par­lia­ment cal­en­dar, there are two ses­sions of the low­er Cham­ber planned for June: on the 14th and 27th.  Pre­sum­ably, that’s when the bill might be passed in the sec­ond read­ing.