The Belarusian de facto authorities have designated our website (d9lb3qyw8jhbr.cloudfront.net) and social media accounts (Instagram, VK, Twitter, YouTube) as “extremist materials.” If you read or follow us from Belarus, this may not be safe. We have prepared a guide so you understand your risks and how to reduce them.

Legally, distributing, storing, producing or transporting “extremist materials” may lead to administrative liability under Article 19.11 of the Code of Administrative Offenses.

Contents

1. What may count as “distribution”?
2. What may count as “storage”?
3. What are the possible consequences?
4. IMPORTANT
5. Which actions involving our resources are not formally punishable?
6. What should our followers do if they are in Belarus or plan to visit our pages?
7. Our position

What may count as “distribution”?

• forwarding our posts in group chats and private messages;
• likes and comments on our posts;
• adding hyperlinks to our materials in your own publications;
• joint publications with us;
• reposts on social media;
• publishing photos with our watermarks or logos;
• putting up or handing out our stickers and flyers;
• wearing merch with our branding.

What may count as “storage”?

• following/subscribing to our social media;
• screenshots of our publications in your device’s gallery;
• our materials in your messenger’s cache;
• keeping our stickers and merch.

What are the possible consequences?

• a fine of 10 to 500 base units;
• administrative arrest of up to 15 days for each separate “offense” (for example, for three reposts you can be jailed three times in a row, for a total of 45 days);
• confiscation of the “instrument of the offense” (for example, the phone used to make the repost, or even your car if you keep our flyers in its glove compartment).

Also, if your website contains links to our publications, it may be blocked or likewise designated “extremist.”

IMPORTANT

Law enforcement may treat certain forms of cooperation with us as crimes.

“Facilitating extremist activity” (Article 361-4 of the Criminal Code):

• sending information or media materials (photos and videos);
• signing up for bots;
• interviews and expert commentary;
• completing tasks and any other kind of help.

“Financing extremist activity” (Article 361-2 of the Criminal Code):

• donations in any form (regular money, cryptocurrency, transferring goods).

For these actions you may face criminal liability: restriction of liberty for up to 5 years or imprisonment for up to 8 years, with or without a fine.

These articles of the Code of Administrative Offenses and the Criminal Code are applied retroactively. This means you can be punished for any of the actions above even if they took place before our social media and materials were designated “extremist.” For example, for a repost of our publication that you made five years ago and never deleted, or for a donation you sent us in 2020 from a card issued by a Belarusian bank.

Which actions involving our resources are not formally punishable?

• visiting our resources without following/subscribing to them;
• mentioning our organization without direct links;
• keeping and sharing the content of our texts without direct links or crediting us as the authors (provided the authorities do not consider any of them to contain elements of other offenses, such as “insulting a government official” or “inciting hatred”).

What should our followers do if they are in Belarus or plan to visit our pages?

• Unfollow/unsubscribe from our social media, and regularly clear your search and browsing history if you keep reading us without subscribing.
• When visiting our resources, use a VPN and your browser’s incognito mode so your searches aren’t saved and recommendation algorithms aren’t tuned to them.
• If possible, delete all reposts of our publications from your pages, private messages containing links to us, and hyperlinks to us in your publications and work.
• Remove your likes and comments under our posts.
• Check your “Saved” tabs, browser bookmarks, Stories archive on Instagram, Facebook and Telegram, and your YouTube watch history for our posts and links to us.
• Clear your conversations with our staff in private messages, email, and via our social media accounts.
• Delete screenshots of our publications and photos with our branding from albums and galleries on your devices. Also delete them from the “Recently deleted” folder, from cloud storage, and from your cloud storage trash.

Our position

The designation of our social media, like that of thousands of other independent Belarusian information resources, is politically motivated. With this decision, the Belarusian regime wants to make our human rights work harder and to punish the people who help us carry out our mission of advancing the public interest. This decision violates a number of the Republic of Belarus’s international legal obligations to respect human rights at once: the right to freedom of expression, the right to freedom of association, the right to a fair trial, and the right to freedom from discrimination. For our part, we will keep helping people learn about their rights and stand up for them, and we will keep documenting the regime’s human rights violations.