Statement by the Congress of the Belarusian Association of Journalists on changes to the Law on Mass Media

The draft law pos­es risks for soci­ety and the media sec­tor. In par­tic­u­lar, it pro­vides for:

• Vol­un­tary reg­is­tra­tion of online resources as mass media (the term «online media” has been intro­duced). The online media and their staff will receive (to a lim­it­ed extent) the rights of tra­di­tion­al media. How­ev­er, only a cor­po­rate enti­ty, which is locat­ed in a non-res­i­den­tial prop­er­ty and has an edi­tor with more than five years of rel­e­vant expe­ri­ence, can reg­is­ter a media out­let;

• The jour­nal­is­tic sta­tus of staff of online media, which fail to reg­is­ter as mass media, will be put in ques­tion. The jour­nal­ists of such media will not be able to enjoy the rights to the pro­tec­tion of infor­ma­tion sources and to the work at pub­lic events. Mean­while, the unreg­is­tered online pub­li­ca­tions will be sub­ject to all the duties and respon­si­bil­i­ties of online media;

• The work of free­lance jour­nal­ists will become even more com­pli­cat­ed;

• The abil­i­ty to block cer­tain social net­work­ing sites com­plete­ly, if there is no tech­ni­cal pos­si­bil­i­ty to restrict access to parts of them;

• The manda­to­ry iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of the com­men­ta­tors on the forums will be intro­duced; there is a pro­vi­sion for the manda­to­ry con­tent mod­er­a­tion of online resources, the absence of which may lead to block­ing.

Com­ments and sug­ges­tions of the Belaru­sian Asso­ci­a­tion of Jour­nal­ists have not been tak­en into account dur­ing the con­sid­er­a­tion of this draft law. Sug­ges­tions of oth­er rep­re­sen­ta­tives of the media sec­tor have also not been heard. No inter­na­tion­al exam­i­na­tion of the draft has been car­ried out.

In this regard, we call upon the Belaru­sian author­i­ties to:

• dis­cuss the pro­posed changes to the media leg­is­la­tion with the par­tic­i­pa­tion of Belaru­sian and inter­na­tion­al experts, rep­re­sen­ta­tives of the media sec­tor, busi­ness and soci­ety;

• revise the draft law in its sec­ond read­ing tak­ing into account all the opin­ions (includ­ing the com­ments and sug­ges­tions of the Belaru­sian Asso­ci­a­tion of Jour­nal­ists, which were sub­mit­ted to the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives);

• recog­nise the right of free­lancers to col­lect and dis­sem­i­nate infor­ma­tion in domes­tic and for­eign media.

20 April 2018

Con­gress of the Belaru­sian Asso­ci­a­tion of Jour­nal­ists