General prosecutor's office names 5 people who detained Euroradio's journalists

22/08/2011 - 09:23

Euroradio complained to the General public prosecutor's office about illegal detentions of journalists at the "silent actions" in the end of July. Three Euroradio's correspondents suffered from the plainclothed policemen's actions for the period since June 22 till July 6. The prosecutor's checking lasted for a little more than a month. The Resolution prepared upon results of this checking belongs to the documentation "for internal use only", so we were not allowed to scan or photo its pages. However, we have copied it by hand, so now we can quote the most interesting extracts.

Firstly, the checking confirmed that Euroradio's journalist Pavel Sviardlou was detained for no grounds twice.

“It has been precisely clarified that on 22.06.2011 and 03.07.2011 Sviardlou P.L. committed no actions which violated the public order. Apart from this, it is seen from the explanations given by Lastouski A.A. that the representatives of the law-enforcement authorities had an objective opportunity to identify personality of Sviardlou P.L., his affiliation to mass media and to check whether the correspondent had the necessary accreditation with him, on the spot, upon necessity".

The General public prosecutor's office came to the conclusion that, as a result of this detention “there was impairment of Pavel Sviardlou's rights, this includes illegal limitation of his rights as a mass media's representative”. The same impairment of rights was committed against another correspondent of Euroradio - Andrey Yeliseyeu.

The public prosecution paid special attention to the detention conducted by two representatives of the 4th squadron of the special police regiment of Minsk city administration of internal affairs of Minsk city executive committee at the Independence Day parade.

“…despite absence of proofs that Sviardlou P.L. committed unlawful actions, Chief Inspector of the point for protection public order of the Frunze district administration of internal affairs, Minsk, made an administrative charge under Article 17.1 of the Code of Administrative Offences (petty hooliganism) on 03.07.2011 against the detained journalist. After this, the representative of mass media was delivered to the Center for isolation of law-breakers of Minsk city administration of internal affairs of Minsk city executive committee”.

This charge's destiny was sad. The checking revealed that two Frunze district policemen - K.and G. - lost it together with the whole file the next day after the journalist was detained. The General public prosecutor's office made a guess why the document had been lost by two policemen at a time - one of them was passing it to another and so...

What will happen to policemen, who committed illegal detentions of the journalists? The General public prosecutor's office suggests that Anatol Kuliashou should “consider the issue of subjecting to disciplinary responsibility” those representatives of the Interior Ministry, “whose unprofessional actions led to severe violation of legal rights and interests of a foreign media's representative and grounded complaints of a series of mass-media to the General public prosecutor's office”.

The prosecutors will receive information on how the Interior Minister will punish his subordinates in the beginning of September.

In the archive photo: Pavel Sviardlou released from the police department after one of the detentions.