The Ministry of Information has updated its national list of extremist materials. The Facebook account of BelaPAN has been added to it. The decision was made by the Hlusk District Court on March 17. The account has not been updated since August 2020.
BelaPAN is a Belarusian independent news agency. It was dismantled in 2021 and later designated as an extremist formation. In March 2024, a court upheld a prosecutor’s claim to liquidate the joint-stock company BelaPAN. The process was formally completed in January this year. In 2023, convictions were handed down in a case against the agency’s staff, including journalist and media manager Andrei Alyaksandrau, his wife Iryna Zlobina, former agency director Dzmitry Navazhylau, and BelaPAN’s editor-in-chief and director Iryna Leushyna. Leushyna has already served her sentence and was released at the end of 2024.
The list maintained by the Ministry of Information was also expanded, by a decision of the same Hlusk District Court, to include several Belsat accounts. These include the Facebook pages “Belsat doc”, “Belsat Life”, and “Belsat Ukrainian”.
In addition, three Instagram accounts with their logos have been added: “svobodnyi_grsmu”, “dumka.me”, and “volat_2.0”.
It should be recalled that extremism-related charges are used by the Belarusian authorities to target opponents and dissent more broadly.