The jour­nal­ist was sum­moned to court by an SMS. His car broke down and he warned the court sec­re­tary that he won’t man­age to come; the tri­al was held in asben­tia.

It has been the six adm­nis­tra­tive case against Kas­tus Zhuk­ous­ki this year. The arti­cle under con­sid­er­a­tion was the report «Mazyr: the dis­till­ing fac­to­ry goes bank­rupt» shown on Bel­sat on Feb­ru­ary 9. The free­lancer is said to have pro­duced the report ille­gal­ly — because the chan­nel Bel­sat is not accred­it­ed by the Belaru­sian For­eign Affairs Min­istry. We remind that one of the argu­ments of BAJ lawyers is that the Law on Mass Media defines that mass media prod­ucts are pro­duced by a mass medi­um, where­as jour­nal­ist car­ries out activ­i­ties on gath­er­ing, edit­ing infor­ma­tion. So, the arti­cle is wrong­ly applied against nat­ur­al per­sons, where­as it can only apply to legal enti­ties which rep­re­sent mass media. The sec­ond argu­ment is that any Belaru­sian cit­i­zen has the right to gath­er and dis­sem­i­nate infor­ma­tion, the right is guar­an­teed by art. 34 of the Belaru­sian Con­sti­tu­tion.

The chart on admin­is­tra­tive fines imposed on Belaru­sian free­lancers accord­ing to art. 22.9 shows that Kas­tus Zhuk­ous­ki is the leader here; the jour­nal­ist is con­vinced that this is pur­pose­ful per­se­cu­tion intend­ed to pre­vent him from work.

Harassment of Freelancer in Homel Sees No End