Two Websites Warned by the Information Ministry

The infor­ma­tion about it appeared on the web­site of the Min­istry on March 2 under the title “Law is to be observed”.

EJ.by was warned for “dis­cretiza­tion of the Armed Forces of the Repub­lic of Belarus: the text about mil­i­tary poten­tial of the Belaru­sian army was accom­pa­nied by a pho­to of Ger­man trans­port dat­ing back to WWII.

NN.by was warned for the pub­li­ca­tion “In Belarus red lev­el of demo­graph­ic alarm: each year, a dis­trict cen­ter “gets extinct”. The infor­ma­tion is not true, says the Min­istry, refer­ring to the data of the Belaru­sian Sta­tis­tics Com­mit­tee http://belstat.gov.by/. “Such inac­cu­rate infor­ma­tion in the arti­cle on nn.by dis­cred­its the effec­tive­ness of the state demo­graph­ic pol­i­cy,” writes the Min­istry.

Two warn­ing are enough to get blocked by the Min­istry of Infor­ma­tion.

Also, the Min­istry reports that with­in the peri­od from Jan­u­ary 2015 to March 2016, it restrict­ed access to 46 web­sites, for the rea­sons that the web­sites vio­lat­ed the pres­i­den­tial decree on coun­ter­act­ing ille­gal drugs trade; using tabooed and vul­gar lex­i­con; dis­tri­b­u­tion of infor­ma­tion aimed to prop­a­gate pornog­ra­phy; improp­er adver­tis­ing of med­ical sub­stances; dis­tri­b­u­tion of infor­ma­tion which can be harm­ful to nation­al inter­ests; adver­tis­ing alco­hol drinks; dis­trib­ut­ing extrem­ist mate­ri­als.

The chair­per­son of BAJ Andrei Bas­tunets under­lines that a warn­ing is not a pre­ven­tive mea­sure, but a sanc­tion. Two warn­ings can result in a clo­sure of the mass medi­um. As for an online resources, this is a prece­dent because ear­li­er the Min­istry did not even issue warn­ings – it ordered to block web­sites straight­away (as it was the case with kyky.org). The lawyer empha­sizes that it is an unac­cept­able inter­ven­tion of the state into free­dom of speech. No one knows if the Min­istry has done it by its own ini­tia­tive, or some­body request­ed to act this way. Andrei Bas­tunets sug­gests that there are oth­er ways to argue: for instance, for the inter­est­ed per­sons to ques­tion the mass media involved and demand refu­ta­tion.

Nasha Niva edi­tors answered that the arti­cle con­cerned was writ­ten by a read­er in the sec­tion Opin­ions, and the author sup­port­ed his opin­ion with argu­ments; the news­pa­per draws atten­tion that they had also pub­lished the offi­cial demo­graph­ic data of Bel­stat.