News

Today the Lithuanian Union of Journalists’ (LŽS) Journalist Rights Defence and Monitoring Committee officially appealed to the Lithuanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs with a proposal to take active action to defend journalists in neighbouring Belarus from baseless persecution.

Volha Siakhovich, a representative of the Belarusian Association of Journalists,  delivered speech during the UN Security Council Arria meeting. Since the beginning of the 2020 presidential election campaign, the situation with freedom of speech in Belarus has deteriorated dramatically as the authorities launched a violent crackdown trying to discourage journalists and bloggers from reporting on election-related protests. Since May, the authorities have stepped up their efforts to curb media coverage of the protests in Belarus, with more journalists being arrested than ever before.

Journalists deprived of accreditation in Belarus on August 29:

Alena Scharbinskaya, a correspondent with the independent satellite broadcaster Belsat TV, was among dozens of journalists detained last week in Belarus when protests erupted after the re-election of President Aleksandr Lukashenko, whose victory has been contested by many voters and the opposition. She was kept for three days in the now-infamous detention center known among locals as “Akrestsin,” the name of the Minsk street where it is located.