Brest court: Lists of voters are classified materials

The court refused to start a proceeding as to making the voter lists public.

The complaint on the matter was sent to Brest Lenin district’s court by the chairwoman of the city organization of the Belarusian leftist part ‘Just World’ Ludmila Dzienisienka, who had taken part in the electoral campaign as a runner for a seat in the city council, the web-site of the Viasna human rights center reports.

She tried to find out, who really voted at home at the polling station number 44 in 13 constituency, where she had run as a candidate. According to the ‘Just World’ activist, the protocol of this station’s electoral commission says that on 23 March 168 people voted at home. However, Dzienisienka, believes that it was impossible to visit such a number of houses in several hours (there are multiple private houses in the territory of the constituency), and she tried to check, whether the mentioned 168 people had actually voted at home.

In her complaint to court Ludmila Dzienisienka demanded that the actions were found illegitimate of Brest city and region electoral commission, which denied the former candidate the possibility to study the lists of the voters, who had voted at home, and oblige the administration of Brest’s Lenin district to provide these lists.

However, the judge Alena Kavalchuk refused to start civil proceedings upon Ludmila Dzienisienka’s complaint, having said that the complaint could not be considered by the court “due to its being beyond jurisdiction”. At the same time Kavalchuk referred to the point that the Electoral Code of the Republic of Belarus said nothing about the possibility for candidates to appeal against the decisions of electoral commissions to deny the rights to study the lists of the voters, who had took part in the voting.