BELARUS NEWS AND ANALYSIS

DATE:

27/07/2007

Belarusian human rights activist: "Situation with human rights in Belarus is miserable"

"The situation with human rights in Belarus is miserable; it is even worse than in Russia," Vice President of the FIDH, international human rights federation and chair of Vesna human rights center Ales Byalyatsky is quoted as saying by a REGNUM correspondent at a news conference in St. Petersburg today.

Byalyatsky noted that within last three years, 300 of 2,000 Belarusian human rights organizations were closed down, "although there were no serious grounds for that, and the claimants were purely formal." He informed that his organization was also withdrawn registration in 2003, and since 2005, a bill was passed in Belarus that introduces criminal responsibility with a sentence of up to three years for participating in an unregistered NGO.

Byalyatsky stressed that about 1,000 people of ten million living in Belarus are members of various human rights organizations. "Membership in such organizations does not allow a person working and declaring one's rights in public, particularly, through the media," he added. According to the activist, Belarus is now "an island of the USSR" and the government by all means is hampering development of democracy and activity of human rights organizations in the country.

At the news conference, Byalyatsky also commented on an annual report of the Observatory for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders. "The document is one of the most serious ones for the United Nations, the OSCE and other respectable international human rights institutions," the expert believes. "Our organization (FIDH - REGNUM) reacts to it and sends an inquiry to the government of a country, where human rights abuse was registered, but it does not necessarily results in what we need, and violations use to take place again," said Byalyatsky.

Source:

http://www.regnum.ru/english/862644.html