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Foreign Policy: Makei mixes up names and facts

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Foreign Policy: Makei mixes up names and facts

Several gross mistakes were found in the report released by the Belarusian MFA.

American Foreign Policy magazine writes about the report.

«Belarusian government, a last bastion of authoritarianism in Europe frequently blasted by Western government and human rights organizations for its crackdowns on the media and opposition groups, has struck back with a human rights report of its own. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs report, titled, "Human Rights Violations in Certain Countries in 2012,"  aims to highlight “human rights violations in those countries that traditionally represent themselves as “developed democracies”.

The report surveys 23 European countries plus the United States. The U.S. section makes for interesting bizzaro-land reading.  There are a few real-world issues that are frequently brought up by activists in the United States, such as the police crackdowns on Occupy Wall Street and last year's anti-NATO demonstrations in Chicago, concerns about privacy wiretapping, and drone strikes, as well as the fact that "600 thousand of Washington’s residents are not entitled to elect their representatives to the Senate and the House of Representatives."

The authors also seem to relish pointing out the difficultires faced by OSCE observers during last year's election in some parts of the country.

There are also some strange inaccuracies, such as the reference to "G. Stein, a candidate from the Green Party, [who] has on several occasions during the electoral campaign been subjected to administrative arrest, owing to his participation in peace protests." Jill Stein, who is a woman, was arrested at an environmental protest. With some unclear wording the report alsoseems to  imply that the U.S. government paid to broadcast the Innocence of Muslims on Pakistani TV rather thanads disavowing it», - said in the artickle.

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