Elena Tonkacheva: 2012 was the year of cooperation of human right activists
For the human right activists the main negative result of 2012 consists in the fact that so far there are political prisoners in Belarusan jails.
As an example of another negative trend she named the fact that Belarus continues to employ death penalty as extreme penalty.
This information reported to the EuroBelarus Information Service the head of the Legal Transformation Centre “Lawtrend” Elena Tonkacheva.
“We haven’t received any reasons to think that internal mechanisms of protection of human rights in Belarus are getting stronger institutionally. It is one of the most pressing problems. The question of citizens’ participation in decision-making can be rated as one with the same complexity degree”, - said Elena Tonkacheva.
What concerns positive year results, the head of the Legal Transformation Centre “Lawtrend” noted that 2012 was the year of rather strong professional cooperation between human rights organizations. Human rights activists have worked out comprehension of who has these or those competences in certain narrow fields. Human rights organizations have also learnt to put the output of their actions into the common product.
In addition, in 2012 Lawtrend together with colleagues from other human rights organizations carried out monitoring of courts basing on common tools. “An observer’s diary” was developed for it, as well as a court observation form. And this is a unique example on the post-Soviet area, when human right activists of Belarus have one common tool for data gathering, and they will keep working with it. “Legal Transformation Centre” came out as initiator of the common tool for court monitoring, and during the document preparation Lawtrend, Human Rights Centre “Viasna” and “Centre for Human Rights” association have been most active. “Perhaps, we will come to the synchronization of collection, generalization and storage of information arrangement, as well as synchronization in other spheres of our activity”, - specified Elena Tonkacheva.
She added that next year Legal Transformation Centre will continue work in their traditional expert spheres, which include questions of freedom of association, access to justice and legal aid. In 2013 Lawtrend is also going to develop an unexplored area, connected with access to the state-run information.
- For the Legal Transformation Centre questions connected with the detailed analysis of the national mechanisms of protection of human rights will be in the focus of attention. We will also continue to explore the problems of realisation of the mechanisms of the citizens’ participation in decision-making carefully, as well as the questions of the administrative justice as a mechanism and method of proper management. We will be concentrated more on the search of answers to the questions specified and will try to hold a discussion with the state about it, - said Elena Tonkacheva. – This is what we are going to do, in case foreign challenges don’t dictate us additional terms and boundaries. Because protection of human rights means not only planned, but spontaneous actions as well, which meet the challenge of this or that situation.
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