Another reason for banning trips abroad appeared in the new law, “preventive supervision”

“The chamber of representatives” passed in the first reading the draft law on the order of leaving abroad by Belarusian citizens.

As informed by the director of the National Law and legal research centre of Belarus Valery Mitskevich said, the document makes common rules for exit and entry procedure for citizens of Belarus, defines issues of formalizing permanent residence of citizens outside the country. It sanctions limiting the right for leaving the country for Belarusian citizens, establish grounds for such limitations, and circumstances under which they could be granted a right for temporarily departure: urgent medical treatment, participation in criminal trails abroad, death or grave illness of relatives living abroad.

For instance, leaving abroad could be temporarily limited, when a citizen has information constituting state secret, is a suspect or a in a criminal case. In case somebody hasn’t paid some fine, for instance, for road traffic offence (crossing the street in a wrong place), for being a free rider, or for illegal parking; or in a case your relative or neighbour has filed a civil suit against you, even when it hasn’t been proved your are guilty, when proceedings are pending, a citizen won’t be allowed to go abroad for a business trip or holidays.

As said by Mitskevich, the list of grounds also has such a notion as “preventive supervision decided by the court or opening of bankruptcy proceedings”. He told that citizens should be informed about decisions on limiting the right to leave the country or lifting such a limitation at least one working day after the date of the decision’s adoption.

As underlined by the director of the centre, “many European states and other countries of the world have a norm connected with temporarily departure of their or foreign citizens: if they have liabilities inside the country, for instance, financial, alimony and others.” He underlined that technically these grounds had been mentioned in the presented draft law. Touching upon the administrative violations of citizens and a possibility of temporarily limitation of their right for departure, he turned attention to the fact that “a decree of the court or a relevant enforcement document is necessary”.

Speaking about bringing a civil action as grounds necessary for limiting the right for exit for citizens of Belarus on the list, V. Mitskevich underlined that the decision on temporarily limiting the right for departure would be adopted by the court basing on assessing reasoning of complainants, which would allow eliminate a possibility of the complainant to abuse his rights.

Besides, V. Mitskevich informed that underage citizens won’t be able to leave the country accompanied by a legal representative without permission of the second legal representative.

As the Charter’97 press-centre informed, according to the Belarusian Internal Affairs Ministry, in early 2008 the list of persons restricted to travel abroad contained about 100,000 names. And on June 5 on the same year the first deputy chairman of the State Customs Committee Vadzim Zaitsau told that the database of the border service of Belarus contained about 260,000 persons restricted to travel abroad, which equals to about 2.5% of the total number of citizens, or about 3% of adult population. By the way, about 0.14% of the population in Russia is on such lists.

As a press-conference on June 4, 2008 the head of the Citizenship and migration department of the Interior Affairs Directorate of Minsk city executive committee Mikalay Sheuchyk refused to reveal the information about the number of blacklisted Minsk citizens, referring to the fact that “this database terrifies citizens”. Besides, as said by him, the number is changing every day.

The list is formed basing upon information received from Ministries of Interior Affairs, Defense, Justice, from Prosecutor’s office, the State Security Committee and other agencies. The mechanism of forming the database is simple – a certain state body is in charge of every category for which leaving abroad is limited. As soon as a person comes into the view of these state agencies, information about him or her is put on the database immediately.