“Go Away” – another “extremist” slogan

Hearing in a lawsuit filed by independent newspaper “Narodnaya Volya” against the Ministry of Information has been adjourned till March 28.

As Katsyaryna Karatkevich, a judge of the Supreme Economic Court, said, she needed to think over the arguments of the two parties, BelaPAN reports.

The hearing in the lawsuit started in the Supreme Economic Court this morning. “Narodnaya Volya” asks the court to invalidate the warning from the Ministry of Information of January 14, 2011. According to officials, there was a violation of the law in a September article “Who will hear ‘Go away!’ slogan?” dedicated to launching an action by Young Front. The newspaper got a warning for “spreading the information on behalf of the organization that has not been registered in an established order”.

As the editor-in-chief of “Narodnaya Volya” newspaper, Iosif Syaredzich, said today in court, “the warning from the Ministry of Information has no grounds” and was an “example of censorship of the independent press and improper performing of their professional duties by representatives of the Ministry”.

The author of the article, journalist Lyubou Lunyova, said she had written not about Young Front, but about the civil campaign “Go away!” carried out by youth initiatives.

Representatives of the plaintiff Harry Pahanyaila acquainted the court with a number of examples, when state-run papers mentioned organizations that are not registered in Belarus (Independent Institute of Socioeconomic and Political Studies and Young Front) and interviewed their representatives.

As representatives of the Ministry of Information think, these facts do not have any relation to the matter.

We remind that the Ministry of Information also ordered Avtoradio to stop broadcasting because the radio station had aired the address of presidential candidate Andrei Sannikov containing the words “the fate of the country will be decided not in the kitchen, but on the square”.