One More Administrative Report against Larysa Shchyrakova

The video report “Barysau tragedy might repeat in Homel” is dat­ed Feb­ru­ary 7. Res­i­dents of a new­ly built house in town Bal­shavik, Homel dis­trict, com­plained about faults in builders’ work and con­cen­tra­tion of car­bon monox­ide in their flats.

Relat­ed: Gas leak in Barysau leaves six peo­ple dead

“After the video report, gas ser­vices cor­rect­ed all the flaws. The pub­li­ca­tion helped resolve the prob­lem about which the res­i­dents had com­plained to many agen­cies for sev­er­al years,” says Larysa Shchyrako­va. “To tell the truth, after two ana­log­i­cal cas­es were closed, I hoped that com­mon sense has won and free­lancers won’t be per­se­cut­ed any longer. But, it looks that loos­en­ing the grip was just a tac­ti­cal step of the offi­cials. As to the charges in essence, accord­ing to the Con­sti­tu­tion of Belarus and arti­cle 19 of the ICCPR, which Belarus rat­i­fied, I have all rights to gath­er and dis­sem­i­nate infor­ma­tion, and I exer­cise the right,” says the jour­nal­ist.

Since the begin­ning of the year, four admin­is­tra­tive reports accord­ing to art. 22.9 (ille­gal pro­duc­tion and dis­tri­b­u­tion of mass media prod­ucts) have been drawn up against Larysa Shchyrako­va; two of the cas­es were closed.