Minsk City Court Leaves in Force Two Warnings to Independent Society of Legal Research

The Independent Society of Legal Research has received two warnings from the Justice Board of Minsk City Executive Committee. The first of them was issued for alleged hindrance to officials of the justice board by ISLR Head Alena Tankachova and the ISLR Board member Smalianka during the check-up of the public association “Next Stop New Life”. The officials consider as such hindrance the telephone talk of Alena Tankachova with Aliaksandr Kharyton while he was trying to receive for the check-up the corpus of documents from the member of “Next Stop New Life” Yelistratava. The second warning was issued for the article of Ms. Smalianka “The order of check-ups by registering bodies” that was published in the bulletin of the unregistered “Assembly of Democratic NGOs”. In the article the order of check-ups of public organizations is analyzed. The Justice Board of Minsk CEC considered this article as a violation of the Code of Administrative Violations. The ISLR didn’t agree with the warnings and complained against them to Minsk City Court. However, on 5 November the court, being guided only by testimonies of representatives of State bodies (representatives of the Justice Ministry Kharyton and Bondar and the worker of the justice board Shcharbovich) didn’t satisfy the suit and left the warnings in force. The persons who attended the trial are of opinion that the testimonies of the officials, to put it mild, were deceitful. According to Alena Tankachova, the court decision didn’t base on any law.

Henadz Kesner