Belarus

New York, December 17, 2007—The Committee to Protect Journalists is deeply worried about a defamation lawsuit by a Belarusian senior government official against the independent weekly Novy Chas in the capital, Minsk. A ruling against the paper would bankrupt Novy Chas and force it to shut down, according to local CPJ sources.

In late October, Nikolai Cherginets, a member of the parliament’s upper chamber and chairman of the Committee on Foreign Relations and National Security, filed a civil lawsuit against Novy Chas’s publisher, Vremya Novostei, and its reporter Aleksandr Tamkovich. The suit stems from Tamkovich’s critical profile of Cherginets, published in the September 24 issue of Novy Chas, the paper’s editor-in-chief, Aleksei Korol, told CPJ.

New York, March 21, 2007—A judge in the western city of Grodno has sentenced Igor Bantsyr, a reporter for the independent Polish-language magazine Magazyn Polski na Uchodzstwie, to 10 days in prison for “uncensored swearing” in public.

Judge Natalya Kozel of the Leninsky district court convicted Bantsyr on Monday after hearing testimony from two police officers who claimed they heard the journalist swearing in the center of the city, according to local press reports. The officers arrested Bantsyr at 4 p.m. on Sunday in downtown Grodno, the Belarusian Association of Journalists reported.

The assassin in a baseball cap who gunned down Anna Politkovskaya outside her Moscow apartment used a silencer. But reverberations from the contract-style slaying of Russia's icon of investigative journalism were felt around the world.

Determined to forestall the kind of democratic uprising that toppled the government in neighboring Ukraine, authoritarian leader Aleksandr Lukashenko and his government crushed dissent in the run-up to the March presidential election—and well beyond. Official results showed that Lukashenko collected 83 percent of the vote to gain a third term, but international observers said the election fell far short of democratic standards. Authorities arrested dozens of domestic and foreign journalists who tried to report on the campaign and subsequent demonstrations in the capital, Minsk, over voting irregularities. In the months surrounding the election, the Lukashenko administration made it nearly impossible for independent and opposition media to deliver news and opinion to their audiences. The state postal service refused to deliver newspapers critical of the government; the state distribution agency banned sales of such papers on newsstands; printing houses refused to print them under government pressure; and border police confiscated entire press runs of publications that managed to find alternative printers abroad. Under such dismal conditions, papers set up distribution systems reminiscent of the underground press in Soviet times, selling copies from their newsrooms and dispatching volunteers to deliver them door-to-door to subscribers. Even then, some volunteers were arrested, CPJ research shows.