MFA to reaccredit foreign media, all old accreditation cards revoked

There­fore, all pre­vi­ous­ly issued accred­i­ta­tion cards are no longer valid as of Octo­ber 2. 

On Mon­day, 5 Octo­ber 2020, MFA’s Com­mis­sion on Accred­i­ta­tion of For­eign Jour­nal­ists will begin its work with new mem­bers. Online appli­ca­tion forms are to be avail­able on Mon­day morn­ing. To apply for accred­i­ta­tion, one is to fill out a ques­tion­naire in the Press Ser­vice sec­tion of the MFA’s web­site. One may apply for  tem­po­rary or per­ma­nent accred­i­ta­tion. 

The new Reg­u­la­tion defines new terms for con­sid­er­a­tion of appli­ca­tions: 5 days for a tem­po­rary accred­i­ta­tion, and 30 days for a per­ma­nent one.

«In accor­dance with the con­cept of infor­ma­tion secu­ri­ty of the Repub­lic of Belarus, ‘the most impor­tant goal of infor­ma­tion secu­ri­ty is the infor­ma­tion sov­er­eign­ty of the Repub­lic of Belarus». — In the cur­rent sit­u­a­tion we have to exer­cise our sov­er­eign right and apply the nec­es­sary pro­tec­tive mea­sures, includ­ing the new Reg­u­la­tion, — says MFA on its web­site.

In late August, the Belaru­sian author­i­ties deprived sev­er­al jour­nal­ists work­ing for for­eign media of accred­i­ta­tion. Thus, accord­ing to the Belaru­sian leg­is­la­tion, they are not allowed to cov­er events in the coun­try.

The jour­nal­ists who were deprived of accred­i­ta­tion worked for BBC, RFE/RL, Cur­rent Time TV, ARD, Deutsche Welle, RFI, Reuters, Asso­ci­at­ed Press, and France-Presse.

Sep­tem­ber 18 the Min­istry of Infor­ma­tion filed a law­suit to the Eco­nom­ic Court to shut down TUT.BY media out­let. The Min­istry of Infor­ma­tion explains, the rea­son for the law­suit were four warn­ings «due to vio­la­tion of arti­cles 4 and 49 of the Law on Mass Media by TUT.BY» The warn­ings were issued by the Min­istry of Infor­ma­tion itself, the facts of vio­la­tion of the law were not estab­lished by court, while the dead­line for the appeal against three of the warn­ings has not yet expired, although the Min­istry claims the oppo­site in its press release. By his order of Sep­tem­ber 29, 2020, Min­is­ter of Infor­ma­tion Ihar Lut­s­ki sus­pend­ed pro­duc­tion of the online media out­let TUT.BY from Octo­ber 1, 2020 to Decem­ber 30, 2020. This restricts the coun­try’s largest media — TUT.BY — from send­ing jour­nal­ists in field to cov­er street protests.

Protests against the fraud­u­lent elec­tion results con­tin­ue since August 9.