Authorities do not need sober Belarus

The civic initiative “Stop drinking – start living” cannot get legalized because of the obstacles the authorities create.

According to the initiative’s activist Kanstanstin Zhukouski, they faced the problem of finding a legal address when attempting to get registered; the human rights center Viasna reports.

“For example, we find an advertisement about the provision of a legal address, call there and there are no problems, they promise to provide us with a legal address, but later they refuse on various resons. Later we applied to the administration of Gomel’s Central district in order to agree on the legal address at the place of my registration, this is formulated as ”using a residential house or its part for unconventional reasons”. According to the legislation it is possible with the permission of the people, who live in the house and that is it. But even there we had problems”, - the activist explained.

At the administration they responded that the chief architect of the district’s administration will consider the application. Also they wrote from the administration that “You have to receive an agreement from the organizations listed in the part four of the article eight of the Housing Code (the town building, sanitary hygiene and fire safety agencies)”.

“Nothing of that is needed according to the legislation! They create artificial obstacles for us. For example, it is stated in the law that one must come wearing slippers and when you come wearing those, they say that you must wear a fur coat and felt boots on top of that. It is the same with those agreements”, - Kanstanstin Zhukouski believes.

The civic initiative “Stop drinking – start living” raised as an anti-alcoholic, its activists held a number of events against alcoholism and for the healthy way of living in the city.