Belarusian Christian Democracy appeals to Supreme Court against registration denial

The Belarusian Christian Democracy (BCD) party has filed an appeal with the Supreme Court against the denial of state registration by the justice ministry.

“We think that the justice ministry’s decision is ungrounded,” Alyaksey Shein, a member of the BCD founding committee, told BelaPAN earlier. “One of the major reasons cited in the registration denial was that not all people who participated in local meetings to pick delegates to the founding conference remembered how many people participated in the meetings and how many delegates were selected. But people were asked the questions for the verification of information more than two months after the meetings. Surely, some of more than 1,000 people failed to remember the things exactly.”

Mr. Shein said that intimidation had been used against BCD activists to force them to withdraw their signatures from founding papers.

Some 30 such instances are known, he said. “People were intimidated after the conference when we applied to the justice ministry for registration,” he said. “They were summoned by officials of the local executive committees’ ideology offices and told that they should withdraw their signatures or else they will lose their jobs.”

He noted that the founding committee would continue its activities despite the registration denial. “We will work just as we used to,” Mr. Shein said. “What matters to us is work with people and their recognition, not the recognition of Belarusian government officials.”

The justice ministry denied state registration to the BCD party on April 15 but suspended the decision two days later, saying that it needed “to study additional information. On May 12, it made the final decision to deny the legal status to the party. The BCD’s founding conference was marred by numerous violations of an irremediable nature, it claimed.