Trial against Regnum Authors in Minsk

The defen­dants have already spent more than a year behind bars. Dur­ing the first day of the tri­al, accu­sa­tions were heard from the pros­e­cu­tor. The mea­sure of restraint in cus­tody has not been changed. Dmit­ry Alimkin, Yuri Pavlovets and Sergey Shiptenko do not rec­og­nize them­selves as guilty. The defense lawyers say that they do not under­stand the essence of the charges.

Rep­re­sen­ta­tives of around 20 media out­lets have been accred­it­ed to report from the court room.

The crim­i­nal case was filed by the Legal Inves­ti­ga­tion Com­mit­tee fol­low­ing an appeal from the Min­istry of Infor­ma­tion of Belarus, based on con­clu­sions of Nation­al Expert Com­mit­tee on Eval­u­at­ing Infor­ma­tion­al Pro­duc­tion on the Pres­ence / Absence of Signs of Extrem­ism last year. The com­mit­tee found man­i­fes­ta­tions of extrem­ism in the pub­li­ca­tions, con­tributed by the accused authors to the Reg­num News Agency as well as to Lenta.ru and EADAILY Web-resources.

The Belaru­sian Asso­ci­a­tion of Jour­nal­ists asked the offi­cial author­i­ties to make infor­ma­tion on the case pub­lic, all in vain.

Also, in Novem­ber 2017 a range of human rights orga­ni­za­tions called upon the Belaru­sian gov­ern­ment to con­duct the tri­al in the open mode. Con­se­quent­ly, there was tak­en a deci­sion to make the tri­al pub­lic.

- The tri­al caus­es for seri­ous con­cern from the per­spec­tive of free­dom of expres­sion and from the stand­point of jour­nal­ism in Belarus as a whole, — not­ed the BAJ Chair­per­son Andrei Bas­tunets. – It seems to me quite strange that there has been put an equal sign between jour­nal­is­tic work and ille­gal busi­ness activ­i­ties… This approach chal­lenges the work of all free­lance jour­nal­ists, — he added.