EU extends blacklist of Belarusian officials

Work on other restrictive measures goes on.

The EU foreign ministers extended travel sanctions on Belarus on a sitting in Brussels on May 23.

As the press service of the EU Council reports, the foreign ministers approved strengthening the restrictive measures against the Belarusian regime following the recent sentences to Belarusian presidential candidate Andrei Sannikov and other member of the opposition and civil society.

13 individual have been placed on the list persons banned from entering the EU. Their assets in the EU countries will be frozen.

As reported earlier, the new persons on the list are mainly judges and prosecutors in court proceedings against representatives of the political opposition and civil society activists. These measures are taken in view of the ongoing persecution of the opposition and demonstrators by the regime of Lukashenka.

The names of the persons subject to EU’s restrictive measures will be published officially on May 24.

Sanctions against 158 Belarusian officials were imposed on January 31, 2011. Besides Alyaksandr Lukashenka, the list covers two of his sons, Viktar and Dzmitry, minister of defence of Belarus Yury Zhadobin, KGB head Vadzim Zaitsau and other country’s top officials. About 60 of 158 persons on the new list were already mentioned in EU’s similar lists of 2004 and 2006.

In 2008, the European Union froze the travel ban to encourage signals of democratization from Minsk. In late March, the list was extended to 158 persons.

As Maja Kocijancic, deputy spokesperson for EU High Representative for Common Foreign and Security Policy Catherine Ashton, told BelaPAN, work on other restrictive measures goes on.