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Senior police official denies politically motivated inclusion of opposition figures in travel ban list

A senior official at the Belarusian interior ministry denied on Tuesday that the country’s authorities had imposed a foreign travel ban on a number of opposition figures on politically motivated grounds.

National regulations governing the foreign travel of the Belarusian citizens “stipulate clearly who may be barred from traveling abroad,” Yury Lyanchewski, deputy chief of the ministry’s citizenship and migration department, told Interfax-Zapad. “No entries were made [in the database of those under the ban] on politically motivated or some other grounds.”

Commenting on the ban notification procedure, Mr. Lyanchewski said that the police were not required to send a note to a person on the travel ban list. “Citizens do have the right to apply to our officers. A person may obtain a document stating whether he is on the database or not on the same day that he applies for it. But it is not the green light to cross the border. New information may come while the person is traveling to the border, and border guards look at the electronic database, not documents.”

To a question as to whether some people could have been entered in the database on illegitimate grounds by mistake, Mr. Lyanchewski said that mistakes happened because of a “human factor.” “Of course, it is unpleasant – the people suffer moral and material damages. But these are isolated cases, which are quite rare.”

Speaking to reporters on March 1, a few days after the EU imposed travel bans and asset freezes on more citizens of Belarus, Pavel Radzivonaw, a departmental head at the Prosecutor General’s Office, said that persons calling on foreign states and international organizations to impose economic and other sanctions against Belarus might be subjected to a temporary ban on foreign travel and even to criminal prosecution.

A large number of people, including opposition politicians, journalists and human rights defenders, have been barred from traveling abroad since then.

In an interview with a Russian TV channel last week, Alyaksandr Lukashenka said that some opposition figures were under a travel ban because they instigated the West to use sanctions against Belarus. He warned that more names would be added to the travel ban list. //BelaPAN