The United Civil Party passed on February 27 a statement concerning the undemocratic nature of local elections. “Outcomes of candidates’ nomination and registration testify to the regime’s persistent aspirations to return back to the Soviet times and elections without alternative, when only one candidate was nominated in each voting constituency. In the countryside the authorities have already attained their goal and are also close to doing that in the towns,” – reads the UCP statement.

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The newspaper’s founder Romuald Ulan was stripped of the right to conduct entrepreneurial activities in early February by the regional economic court. The man’s complaint has never been satisfied.

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Human rights experts of the OSCE ODIHR mission arrived in Minsk. On February 26 morning the organization’s representatives met with the secretary of the Central Electoral Commission Nikolai Lozovik. In his interview to BelaPAN the secretary said that the visitors aren’t entitled to be observers at elections and they never asked the Central Electoral Commission to endow them with such a status. The goal of the mission, said Lozovik, is to carry out monitoring of the election campaign.

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Another informal meeting of the CIS heads of states is scheduled for May 30 in Saint-Petersburg, Russian media quote Russian Vice-Premier Valentina Matvienko as saying. This information was confirmed to BelaPAN in the CIS executive committee in Minsk.

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Decision to halt investigation into the disappearance of journalist Dmitry Zavadsky was passed by the head of investigation group Ivan Branchel, who’s been placed in charge of the case ever since the ORT cameraman’s vanishing in July 2000. The notification, signed by Ivan Branchel, which has been recently received by Zavadsky’s wife Svetlana, mentions the following root-cause of that: “in connection with the failure to locate the missing individual”.

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In course of one month in 2003 the number of individual entrepreneurs in the Brest region contracted by more than 150 people, now amounting to 28.271, as compared to 28.424 on January 1. Specialists link this fact with the presidential decree #4 “On common tax, levied from individual entrepreneurs and other persons and some measures on regulating the entrepreneurial activities”, which enters into effect on March 1 this year.

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