Non-registration of Belarusian Christian Democracy Party is politically motivated decision
The Belarusian Ministry of Justice took the decision to refuse registration of the BCD dated 14 February 2012. We consider this decision as not compliant with the law and politically motivated.
Absurdity and complete inconsistency of the legal arguments of the Ministry of Justice is made clear from the very reasons for the refusal; they are mainly three:
- Several provisions of the BCD statute do not comply with the legislation of the Republic of Belarus.
We turn the attention of the Belarusian and international community to the fact that the BCD submits the registration documentsfor the fourth time. During all the previous attempts to register the Ministry of Justice did not have any comments on thestatute of the organisation.
The Party Statute did not change. During the last registration attempt no comments were made to the document.
- The Ministry of Justice claims that the letter of guarantee of the legal address for the BCD cannot be recognised as a legally binding a document.
We again draw attention to the fact that the BCD submits the registration documents for the fourth time. During all the previousattempts to register the Ministry of Justice had no comments on the letter of guarantee on the legal address availability for theBCD. This time the letter was identical to the previous.
The legal address for the Party, as in the previous times, was provided by the organization headed by Heorhi Dzmitruk, the BCD co-chairman.
- As during the previous registration attempts the authorities used pressure on the BCD founders at the places of their work or study.
We adequately assess the impact of those repressions on the founders of the Party and work of the secret services of Belarus.Unable to withstand the threats, some of the BCD founders previously had to refuse from their signatures. For this reason the Party organising committee has provided to the Ministry of Justice the list of 1,080 founders (according to the law 1,000 founders are sufficient for the registration of political parties). We are absolutely confident that despite the unprecedented pressure on theParty founders across the whole country, the Ministry of Justice and the Belarusian secret services do not have any claims against more than 1,000 of our founders. There can be only a few cases of the people refusing from their signature because of the pressure exerted on them or their co-operation with the secret services. Thus, there are still more than 1,000 people on the list of the founders, to which the Ministry of Justice has no complaints.
At the moment we have not received an official response from the Ministry of Justice about non-registration of the Party, therefore we do not have a clear picture of the reasons that supposedly formed the basis for this decisions. Most likely, the full details of it will be provided to us only in the court. You can read about the cases of pressure on the BCD founders here:https://d15tqxf9xf6xwt.cloudfront.net/index.php?newsid=6080, http://spring96.org/en/news/48912, http://spring96.org/en/news/49168.
Similar campaigns of repression against the founders BCD party were organised during the three previous attempts to register theParty.
Considering these facts one may have many questions to the behavior of the Ministry of Justice. They did not have a single issue to be clarified with the representatives of the Party during the entire process of registration, except for the requests for some documents, which are not obligatory according to the law. And even after the documents were submitted, the Ministry of Justicedecided to suspend the registration process, as if the BCD did not send anything.
All the reasons, which formed the basis for the decision on non-registration of the BCD, can be divided into three categories:
- The facts achieved in the campaign of repression and intimidation of the BCD founders;
- The facts fabricated or invented by the employees of the Ministry of Justice;
- Potential misprints in the documents; the time to fix those should have been provided to us according to the law.
By the decision of non-registration of the BCD the Ministry of Justice has once again confirmed that fundamental human rights including freedom of association and the association are being violated in Belarus. This decision is, undoubtedly, politically motivated and non-free. The Belarusian Christian Democracy occupies a very uncomfortable position from the authorities’ point of view. They want to have only completely controllable opposition. They don’t need forces that have an independent stand.
The BCD will appeal against the decision the Ministry of Justice to the Supreme Court within a month
