CPJ: “We call upon Charhinets to drop the case”

The New York based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is deeply worried about a defamation lawsuit by a Belarusian senior government official Mikalay Charhinets (Cherginets) against the independent weekly Novy Chas in the capital, Minsk. A ruling against the paper would bankrupt Novy Chas and force it to shut down, according to local CPJ sources. It has been stated in the statement of the CPJ on December 17.

“We are concerned about the charges against Novy Chas, which could result in the closure of one of only a handful independent publications remaining in Belarus,” CPJ Executive Director Joel Simon said. “We call on Mikalay Charhinets to immediately drop his lawsuit. As a public figure, he is subject to higher scrutiny and media criticism than private citizens.”

In late October, Nikolai Cherginets, a member of the parliament’s upper chamber and chairman of the Committee on Foreign Relations and National Security, filed a civil lawsuit against Novy Chas’s publisher, Vremya Novostei, and its reporter Alyaksandr Tamkovich. The trial will start on December 19.

According to the filed claim obtained by CPJ, Charhinets felt that Tamkovich’s article damaged his “honor, dignity, and business reputation as a writer, politician, and general-senator.” In compensation for the alleged moral damage, Charhinets demands 500 million Belarusian rubles (about US$231,000) from Vremya Novostei; 100 million Belarusian rubles (about US$46,000) from Tamkovich; and the seizure of the property and financial assets of both the paper and the author—in the amount of the sought compensation—as a guarantee that the alleged damages would be covered.

The suit stems from Tamkovich’s critical profile of Charhinets, published in the September 24 issue of Novy Chas, the paper’s editor-in-chief, Alyaksei Karol, told CPJ.

The profile, titled “General-Senator Mikalay Charhinets,” criticized the politician’s literary credentials (Charhinets is also a writer) as well as his record of Soviet military service in Afghanistan in the mid-1980s and his rise in Belarusian politics.