Belarusians have been living under state terror for months. The price they are paying for their peaceful fight is too high. We are asking you to act faster and assertively. Western countries should demand new and fair elections and the release of all political prisoners.
Our priorities and recommendations:
Solidarity
- Help host those who were forced to flee Belarus due to political repression. It includes businesses that were closed as the result of strikes.
- Business partners of Belarusian state-owned companies should solidarize with workers who were repressed and fired.
- We ask to consider assistance to victims of repression, independent trade unions, striking committees and small businesses during the crisis and transition period (totally amounted to at least $ 150 million).
- We welcome Western countries’ strong support of civil society and encourage financial support to the Belarusian students and academicians.
- Enhance multidimensional support to the Belarusian independent media increasingly harassed by the authorities.
- Create Emergency Funds to deliver humanitarian aid more effectively.
- Provide assistance to human rights defenders, help pay for lawyers defending Belarusians persecuted for political motives and cover fines imposed upon them.
- Support new initiatives, such as organisations of doctors, athletes, students, and striking committees.
- Consider lifting EU Schengen and national visa requirements for Belarusian citizens coming to the EU.
- Create a free-trade zone of services for small and medium-sized businesses from Belarus.
Pressure
- We would like to encourage you to continue expanding the sanctions list, both individual and economic, on the national level, and lobby for wider sanctions on the EU level. We ask the U.S. Congress to adopt Belarus Democracy, Human Rights, and Sovereignty Act.
- Investigate the corruption schemes and help identify the location of the assets that might be connected to Lukashenka and his cronies.
- It is crucial that Western banks limit any kind of capital support for the two state-owned banks in Belarus, Belarusbank and Belagroprombank. The two banks together control 52% of assets in the country. Currency nominated cash-flows eventually benefit Lukashenka’s regime.
- We urge you to suspend imports from Belarusian state-owned companies, especially petrochemicals and metal products, products of the forestry and woodworking industries, potash and flax.
- We ask Western companies to freeze investments and reinvestments in Belarus at this stage. Foreign partners of Belarusian state-owned enterprises where repressions occur should reconsider these partnerships.
- At the same time, it is crucial to continue importing products and services from Belarus private companies and small businesses, if no signs of labour rights violations inside the companies have been detected.
- Insist on ensuring transparency of business ties between Western companies and the state enterprises in Belarus. The lack of transparency and data about concrete contracts and beneficiaries raise questions about potential corruption and money laundering schemes between the Belarusian government and foreign companies.
- Cut international development aid used by Lukashenka’s regime.
Justice
- We ask OSCE participating States to take responsibility and ensure that all recommendations in the OSCE Moscow Mechanism report are followed.
- An international body to investigate police crimes should be created. Participate in an international investigative mechanism of the human rights violations. Standing up for human rights is not interference.
- Consider various legal avenues to investigate the crimes against humanity.
- Designate OMON and GUBOPiK as terror groups.
- We call for the application of the principle of the universal jurisdiction to prosecute those complicit in excessive violence against demonstrators.
