Collection to pay fines of Polish journalists in Belarus :: Charter'97 :: News

[Presenter] Almost 3,000 dollars have been collected to pay fines for Polish journalists in Belarus. The action, organized by employees of the [public] Polish Television [TVP] regoinal centre in Lodz [central Poland] has been contributed to by very many people and institutions.

Nonetheless, Kataryzna Jagodzinska of the [TVP] Third Programme in Lodz has said that the collected money was barely a half of the required sum.

[Jagodzinska] I know that they will still be asking for this fine of theirs to be payable in instalments. Whether they succeed in this or not, I fear that they might end up in prison.

We would nonetheless like the publication of the Union of Poles in Belarus [ZPnB], the Polish minority news paper [Glos znad Niemna], to function, since freedom of speech is very important and we once fought for this ourselves. We succeeded, so we cannot now stand aside when our colleagues from Belarus need our help.

[Presenter] A dozen or so days ago, a court in Hrodna [northwestern Belarus] sentenced five Polish journalists from the Glos znad Niemna to high fines for having disseminated the truth about the Lukashenka dictatorship and a protest against the closure of the paper`s editotial office.