The Novy Chas newspaper does not make it to Statkevich anymore

The editorial office fights for the political prisoner’s right to receive the independent newspaper.

For a year the addressee has not been receiving the newspaper, which the editorial office subscribed him for. The administrations of the prison and colonies have been referring to the absence of the newspaper in the Belarusian Post Office’s catalogue, the press-service of the Belarusian Association of Journalists reports.

The newspaper’s editor in chief Aliaksei Karol appealed to the Department of Punishments (DoP) about that in November, to the DoP’s department for the Mogilev region, the Mogilev region prosecutor’s office and the Mogilev prison No4, where they keep Mikalai Statkevich.

The chief editor said that Novy Chas was an officially registered newspaper, that neither “the Criminal Code of the Republic of Belarus, nor the internal regulations in prisons prescribe limitations for receiving newspapers, subscribed for exclusively from the Belarusian Post Office’s catalogue. Apart from that, the list of the media, forbidden to be received in the places of confinement (article 82 part 2 of the Criminal Code), only includes newspapers, propagandizing war, interracial, national, religious animosity, violence and cruelty, media with pornographic content”, - Karol emphasized.

As a matter of fact, they only responded from the Mogilev prison and the Department of Punishments for the Mogilev region. The Mogilev region prosecutor’s office forwarder the complaint to the same Mogilev region’s Department of Punishments.

The head of the Prison No4 Dzmitrou responded that Statkevich “subscribes to printed media, which he receives fully and in due time”. Whereas “he did not address the prison’s administration on the issue of a subscription for the Novy Chas newspaper”. The delivery “can be arranged in the case of a subscription according to the demands of the part 1 of the article 89 of the Criminal Code and the article 275 of the internal prison regulations”.

The head of the Department of Punishments for the Mogilev region Skamarokh responded on 7 December that “individual subscription of prisoners for periodicals is arranged via the administration of an institution”, and Statkevich did not address any requests for a Novy Chas subscription to the prison’s No4 administration.