Radio “Racyja” journalist gets a warning

Workers from the prosecutor’s office told Henadz Barbarych that they had listened to all his programs made in 2011 and they had lots of disagreement.

Henadz Barbarych was summoned to Minsk prosecutor’s office in connection with a check-up of Radio Racyia activities, started after the searches on May 2.

According to the journalist, the prosecutor Dzmitry Pastaialka confessed that he had listened to many of his materials on the air and from the confiscated computers. The prosecutor called Barbarych a staff journalist of RR.

“I answered that I am a freelancer: every day I can write to different media and I do not have any contracts with anyone. In the end, I officially refused to give any explanations, referring to the Constitution article allowing not to testify against myself,” said Barbarych.

At the end of the talk the prosecutor declared an official warning against contributing to foreign mass media without accreditation.

The warning was signed by the prosecutor’s deputy Kazimir Kezhun.

The editor’s office of Radio Racyia is located in Poland. It started its broadcast in Belarus in 1999, founded by the Belarusian diaspora in Poland and Belarusian journalists. Then the broadcast was suspended in 2002 and resumed in 2006, by the Belarusian informational center in Bialystok (created in the same year). Now the radio broadcasts on FM frequency and also online http://www.racyja.com.

In Belarus it works illegally, as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has many times denied official accreditation for the radio.