Lukashenka Introduces Fee For Crossing State Border :: Charter'97 :: News

Crossing the state border of Belarus is to be paid for. The fee for its crossing by foreign and Belarusian citizens is introduced. According to the decree, the charge for crossing the border should not exceed one forth of a basic unit (for today it is about 6 Br or 3 USD). The regional councils and Minsk city council are allowed to collect this money.

“It shows that our state is not civilized enough. It is an absurdity to collect money for crossing the border. And for foreign citizens our country remains, and becomes even less attractive for tourism, some business trips and so on. It means only that the state does not have a possibility to collect money from business activities, for example, and it tries to impose some taxes one cannot avoid,” the lawyer, observer of the newspaper “Belorusskiy Rynok” Syarhei Balykin comments the decree.

Andrei Sannikov, former foreign minister of Belarus, international coordinator of civil initiative Charter’97, one of the leaders of “Free Belarus”, shares the opinion about another measure of commercialization of the state border:

“In fact it is really a commercialization of the state border. Such practice does not exist anywhere. When local authorities are empowered to introduce such taxes, the practice of ecology charges exist. When some problematic ecological zones exist, fees for proper preservation of nature are introduced. But more and more commercialization in the state border use, it is incomprehensible for me. I think there is also some kind of hate of the authorities towards the citizens who go abroad for holidays. We know that the highest state officials cannot go to the countries of the European Union, for instance. Firstly, they are not invited, and secondly, there is a black list of persons who cannot enter these countries,” Andrei Sannikov noted.