English

Iryna Khalip allowed to travel to Britain and Russia

 

The probation department of the Partyzanski district police station in Minsk has allowed journalist Iryna Khalip to stay in Britain and Russia until April 3.

In her application for permission to travel abroad, Ms. Khalip wrote that she would like to spend one week in Britain to see her husband and one week in Russia to meet with editors of her newspaper, Novaya Gazeta.

"My husband cannot believe this and will hardly believe until he sees me," Mr. Khalip told BelaPAN . "I'm not going grab my handbag and leave at once either. At first, I'll make sure that I'm not on the government's list of persons banned from leaving Belarus. After all, the scrap of paper I got from probation officers may turn out to be invalid at the border."

According to Ms. Khalip, her application has been granted thanks to Yevgeny Lebedev, a journalist for The Independent, and BelaPAN's correspondent Tanya Korovenkova, who "kept catching Alyaksandr Lukashenka by the hand and holding him to his words that Khalip could go abroad any moment." "They rocked the boat until this wall of nonsense finally moved a little," she said.

Ms. Khalip suggested that the favorable decision on her application could have been due to "another round of bargaining with the West." "If a deputy head of the Presidential Administration's Operational and Analytical Center is going to attend a conference in Vienna, why shouldn't Khalip be allowed to go to England?" she said. "This resembles castling."

Ms. Khalip stressed that she would return to Belarus. "If the authorities hope that I'll never come back, they'll be disappointed," she said. "I'm an exemplary prisoner. My probation period will be over in July, and I'll wait for the court to hear my case."

Ms. Khalip said that she did not know where she would travel first and whether she would take her small son with her. "However, given that March 8 is my husband's birthday, it would be good to celebrate it together," she said.

Iryna Khalip, currently 45 years of age, was given a two-year suspended prison sentence in May 2011 over a post-election street protest staged in Minsk on December 19, 2010. She was ordered to report to a probation officer once a week and come home no later than 10 p.m.

During an interview with Yevgeny Lebedev in October 2012, Mr. Lukashenka ordered that the restrictions on Ms. Khalip’s freedom of movement be removed. However, when Ms. Khalip came to her district police station a few days later and asked whether she was really free to travel to Moscow, police officers told her that such a trip was out of the question.

Speaking at his lengthy news conference on January 15, 2013, Mr. Lukashenka said neither yes nor no when asked the direct question from Tanya Korovenkova as to whether the travel ban had been lifted from Ms. Khalip and whether she would be allowed to go abroad to join her husband, former presidential candidate Andrey Sannikaw.

Instead, Mr. Lukashenka claimed that Ms. Khalip did not want to leave the country.

"If you want to carry her somewhere, go to the prosecutor general tomorrow," he said. "I have the necessary powers. You will pick up and carry her. But she won’t go."

Deputy Prosecutor General Alyaksey Stuk told BelaPAN on January 24 that nothing prevented Ms. Khalip from traveling abroad.

The suspended prison sentence against her does not include a direct prohibition from traveling abroad, he said.

Judging by her sentence, nothing prevents Ms. Khalip from foreign travel, Mr. Stuk said. She should go to her district police station and file an application, which will be considered in accordance with the established procedure, he said