The situation on the eve of the elections*2025. The first report of the "Human rights defenders for free elections" campaign Document

The expert elections*2025 monitoring mission was organized by the Belarusian Helsinki Committee and the Viasna Human Rights Center as part of the "Human Rights Defenders for Free Elections" campaign. The mission collects and analyzes information about the election campaign based on open sources and messages from voters from Belarus.

CONCLUSIONS

The next, seventh, presidential elections* in Belarus have been scheduled by the House of Representatives for January 26, 2025, amid a deep human rights crisis caused by repression following peaceful protests against fraud in the 2020 presidential elections. This repression persists and even intensifies to this day: the authorities continue to arbitrarily persecute candidates, members of campaign teams and initiative groups, observers, activists and simply concerned citizens who have supported the nomination of independent candidates with their signatures. The discriminatory rhetoric of the authorities, who have declared people who do not share pro-government narratives as "enemies", persists and intensifies.

By suddenly calling elections* six months before the expected date and leaving 95 days for the entire procedure, the authorities once again instrumentalized electoral procedures, adjusting the election date to political objectives, thereby violating electoral legislation from the point of view of equality of opportunity for candidates and the principle of election predictability stipulated by international electoral standards.

Conducting a free and open election campaign is impossible in a situation of ongoing political terror: the list of political prisoners is updated weekly and there are consistently more than 1,300 people in it. The information space has been entirely purged; nearly all independent media outlets have been forced out of the country, and the distribution of their materials from abroad is severely hindered by politically motivated misuse of anti-extremist legislation. The "state ideology" serves the cult of authoritarian rule of A. Lukashenka. There is no recognition of the importance of political pluralism in the public field.

The incredible pressure on civil society organizations, especially human rights organizations, and their widespread liquidation exclude civilian control over the conduct of elections. There is no independent civilian monitoring of the elections within the country; at the moment, only the politically biased international election observers are invited.

In such conditions, it can be ascertained that it is impossible for citizens to exercise their electoral rights freely.