Volha Smalianka: Foreign Ministry’s national report is biased re state of freedom of associations

The basis of the Belarusan report says that “everything is good”. The goodness is assessed by statistics, which, under close scrutiny, cannot give effective assessment of the situation.

Let us recall that “EuroBelarus“ Information Service is publishing a series of analytical interviews, which study the content of the recent official report of the Foreign Ministry 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.

Earlier the EuroBelarus Information Service has provided opinions of the lawyer Andrei Sushko, the head of Belarusian Congress Of Democratic Trade Unions (BCDTU) Aliaksandr Jarashuk, and others on the issue.

Today we are publishing the opinion of Volha Smalianka, the head of the Centre for Legal Transformation “Lawtrend” re the assessment of the freedom of association and the problem with registration of NGOs given by the state.

“On May 4 Belarus will be undergoing second cycle of the procedure of the Universal Periodic Review. For that reason the state has also prepared the National Report that was due to reflect the situation with the human rights, as well as the first steps made by the state after the first round of UPR procedure. The idea of UPR was to help the states solve problems with human rights. Ideally, the state should be interested in finding out objective assessment and recommendations in order to improve the situation. Whereas Belarusan report comes from the presumption that everything is good in our country. It doesn’t reflect problems, and, accordingly, it is hard to say that this report corresponds to the announced goals”, - notes Volha Smalianka.

According to her, the report only emphasizes the moments that are positive from the point of view of Belarusan state. But it doesn’t have place for the negative moments from the point of view of human rights.

It is very hard to give any recommendations for improving the situation after reading and studying the report, the expert marks:

“The document has no objective assessment whatsoever – and this is the main and very serious minus of the Foreign Ministry’s report, if we consider the report and its structure in general”.

Volha Smalianka notes that some recommendations on freedom of associations were recognized as acceptable by the state. “However, the information about the realization of the freedom of associations wasn’t reflected in the report. Foreign Ministry has only dedicated several paragraphs for covering this issue and reduced it to statistics. But statistics cannot serve as an effective indicator for assessing the situation. First of all, no full quantitative information is given: there is no statistics of denials in registration of organizations. And basing on these figures the conclusion about the stability of civil society and stable increase in the number of civil society organizations in Belarus is made. But that is contrary to fact, as we can’t talk about significant increase in the number of NGOs in Belarus. The number of registered NGOs hasn’t changed considerably over the last 15 years; everything remains more or less even. Besides, the quantity of registered NGOs – about 2500 – is too little for Belarus. Thus, if we take Czech Republic, the population of which is close to that of Belarus, the number of NGOs there is about 40000. The difference is astonishing”, - says the head of Lawtrend.

Besides, statistics on registered NGOs “doesn’t reflect the overall picture, as it doesn’t demonstrate real number of citizens that take part in the work of these organizations”. “As is known, we can have a lot of organizations with very few members. What is the sense of the huge number of NGOs then? Besides, it is an open secret that there are a lot of organizations in Belarus that only exist on paper, while only 2-3 persons are taking part in their work”, - Volha Smalianka recalls.

She also notes that over many years it is mainly sports organizations that are registered as new. In 2014 they made 57 per cent of all organizations. At the same time over the last years no human rights organizations were registered: “and not only because thee organizations do not submit documents to the Ministry of Justice. They do, but get no registration. Besides, there are fears that some organizations from the ones that already exist might disappear”.

Besides, the report states about the free access to regulatory acts that regulate the work of the civil society organizations. “But this statement is contrary to fact, too. The link to regulatory acts placed at the webpage of the Ministry of Justice leads to the national law portal, but in reality, the access to the texts of documents is non-free. What free access the report means then? Those citizens, who want to establish a public union, cannot even read the regulatory acts before they start establishing it. In general, this is all the information that is presented in the National report, whereas such complicated issues as access to funding, the order of registration of NGOs, criminal liability for the work of non-registered organizations, and a number of other issues are not mentioned in the report”, - emphasizes the expert.

“The positive moment we could mention is the discussion of this report with NGOs, but only if there were real consultations and if the recommendations of NGOs were taken into account. However, the meeting of Foreign Ministry with the representatives of NGOs was organized in the form of Q and A, i.e. there was no real area for discussion and introduction of NGOs’ suggestions. Our organization has presented our written recommendations, but, unfortunately, didn’t get any respond from the Foreign Ministry”, - Volha Smalianka sums up.