Andrei Sushko: Official legal information becomes increasingly less available for Belarusan citizens

How successful will our country go through the human rights procedure within the frames of the UN? “Lawtrend” experts give their assessments to the official report of the Foreign Ministry.

The other day Belarusan Foreign Ministry prepared a report for undergoing Universal Periodic Review within the UN system.

The Universal Periodic Review (UPR) is a unique mechanism of the Human Rights Council (HRC) aimed at improving the human rights situation on the ground of each of the 193 United Nations (UN) Member States. The result of each review is reflected in an “outcome report” listing the recommendations the State under review will have to implement before the next review.

The UPR is a constant reminder to the states about the need to fulfill their obligations in the sphere of human rights and freedoms. The main goal of the UPR is to improve situation in human rights sphere in all countries and fight with violations in any part of the world.

How successful will Belarus undergo this procedure in 2015 and what will UN members see under the microscope?

Andrei Sushko, an expert on access to information, a lawyer from the Legal Transformation Center “Lawtrend” got occupied with study of the Belarusan Foreign Ministry’s report and shares his conclusions re contents of the document, as well as information about the real situation with human rights in Belarus, and the right for education in the sphere of human rights and its presentation in the Foreign Ministry’s report with the EuroBelarus Information Service.

 - Each country should undergo the UPR once in five years. Belarus did it five years ago, and that is why it should go through it once more. The sense of this procedure is the following: the state prepares its own report about the situation with human rights; NGOs and international organizations do their own reports. There can be a lot of documents. In its turn, the UN prepares its own report received by representatives of all countries, and the UPR begins. Basing on the received documents, countries-members of the UN ask questions to the country that is undergoing the procedure as to whether it understands and admits its problems in the human rights sphere. If the answer is positive, the country has to report about the work it has done in five years.

Before Belarus started this procedure, the Foreign Ministry prepared a national report for the UN re the situation with human rights.

In the subsection “G. Right to education, education in human rights sphere” in the clause No.100 Belarusan Foreign Ministry states that the information re human rights, including the order of appeal to the state bodies for protection of one’s rights and interests is available on the webpages of the state run public authorities. Let me note that Lawtrend has been monitoring official webpages for more than 2 years now and we can state that the information that should be placed on the webpages in accordance with the Belarusan legislation is far from being full.

We received the following results: in general, information about cooperation with citizens in the frames of law on appeal to the state bodies is presented by 26 per cent only. I.e. the above-mentioned webpages hold only a quarter of the information that should be there even from the point of view of the Belarusan legislation.

One of the normative acts adopted in a five-year period after Belarus has undergone the latest UPR and that is touched upon in the Foreign Ministry’s report is the law “On appeals of citizens and judicial bodies”. The law says that it should “make state bodies and officials undertake the required measures for restoration of the violated rights, freedoms, and legal interests of citizens in case their appeal and establish control over the realization of these measures”.

However, some rights of citizens provided by this law will be considerably limited in the near future. Why? The House of Representatives of the National Assembly is ready to introduce the changes to this law at short notice. After the changes come into force citizens and judicial bodies won’t be able to appeal to state bodies through e-mail. This is a very important moment that I would like to emphasize.

I have already mentioned the clause No.100. In 2014 during the international comparable research on availability of public information on the official websites, we indicated one more problem: official legal information, i.e. texts of normative acts are becoming increasingly less available for citizens online. There is a possibility to sign up for paid resources and systems, whereas one can only get free access to few documents, and normative acts available for free (at least, most of them) are not updated.

Last year we organized such monitoring of 135 webpages of Belarusan executive committees and confirmed our conclusions made in 2013 that concern information about the order of citizens’ appeal to state bodies. This information is only presented at 35% of websites. Also, most of the resources of the local executive bodies don’t provide any possibility to send official appeals for people with limited vision.

The report prepared by the Foreign Ministry contains smart phrases and well-composed paragraphs of text, where an inexperienced person might see progress in development of our young, though becoming more strong social-orientated state. Those who have deeper knowledge about the real situation can spend long time commenting and criticizing the official stance reflected in the report. I am surprised that professional and educated officials of the Foreign Ministry write and publish texts they don’t believe in.