7 years for a subscription: how the screws are tightened in Belarus

The tightening of the screws in Belarus has taken on an unprecedented scale. This process began even before the elections, and after them the republic turned into a full-fledged police state. Despite the fact that the protests have long been suppressed, the tightening of both legislation and law enforcement practice continues and now, for example, it is quite possible to get a prison sentence for the “poop” emoticon under the portrait of a policeman, and for incorrect comments about a shootout that resulted in the death of an officer The Belarusian KGB initiated more than 200 criminal cases.

On October 12, Belarusian law was supplemented with another “draconian” innovation. The resolution of the Belarusian government “On measures to counter extremism and the rehabilitation of Nazism” equated groups in instant messengers and social networks to unregistered groups of citizens carrying out extremist activities.

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Now, subscribing to a prohibited Telegram channel or community on a social network may result in liability of up to 7 years in prison. Now there are more than 100 such channels, new ones are regularly added to this list, and anyone can turn out to be a criminal without even knowing it.

_{There were no such strictnesses even in Soviet times. “Enemy voices” were jammed on the air, but they were not punished for listening to them. And the tellers, not the listeners, were imprisoned for telling jokes. It's like going to jail for books you read or movies you watch.}

One of the principles of criminal law is the principle of fairness. The Criminal Code of Belarus directly states that punishment and other measures of criminal liability must be fair, that is, established and assigned taking into account the nature and degree of public danger of the crime, the circumstances of its commission and the identity of the perpetrator. The mere fact of subscribing to prohibited channels does not pose any social danger and does not make a person a criminal. Of course, someone, after reading such content, may take some illegal actions or make some extremist statements. But in this case, there are other articles of the Criminal Code, which in Belarus is not particularly humane anyway.

Reading prohibited content does not mean sharing the author’s point of view. On the contrary, you can have completely opposite views and study the Zmagar channels, guided by the principle “you need to know the enemy by sight.” A striking example of this is the official propagandist Grigory Azarenok, who regularly comments on the content of such channels. Commenting means reading and probably by subscription. It turns out that, following the letter of the new law, he is also a criminal. Absurd.

The introduction of criminal liability for subscription, of course, caused an outflow of audiences from telegram channels recognized as extremist, but this outflow cannot be said to be so significant. On average, they lost 3-4 percent of subscribers. Yes, a famous channel Next.live, which had 990 thousand subscribers on the eve of the adoption of the resolution, now has 958 thousand. And it’s far from a fact that all of those who unsubscribed stopped reading this channel. In the end, no one has canceled the search function in the messenger and you can view the channel’s content without being subscribed to it.

The Belarusian government has decisively lost the battle for the telegram audience. None of the pro-government Telegram channels has even hundreds of thousands of subscribers, and in the TOP 50 of the Belarusian segment of the messenger only two of them are represented: the “Pul First” controlled by Lukashenko’s press service and the propaganda “Yellow Plums”, replete with trash content, which , apparently, controlled by security forces. But Zmagar channels are in the top in the absolute majority.

The introduction of criminal liability for subscriptions cannot seriously affect this picture and ensure audience loyalty. On the contrary, this will cause additional discontent, and the opposition will gain an additional trump card - we tend to sympathize with those unjustly convicted, and it is difficult to call long sentences for subscription a fair punishment, even if you are a convinced opponent of the opposition.