Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya met in Warsaw with the Second Vice-Chairperson of the PACE Committee on Culture, Science, Education, and Media, Agnieszka Pomaska, and the Head of the Committee Secretariat, Tatiana Termacic. The meeting took place as part of the preparation of the PACE report “Addressing Culture as a Foundation for the Democratization of Belarus”.
Ms. Tsikhanouskaya thanked the PACE for making Belarusian culture a separate area of the Assembly’s work. She noted that amid Russification and repression, supporting Belarusian culture and language is a matter of preserving national identity and an important condition for future democratic change.
The forthcoming PACE report is expected to examine the state of Belarusian culture inside the country and in exile, Russification and Russian propaganda, the situation of repressed cultural figures, the role of the Belarusian language, transnational repression, and cultural initiatives created by Belarusians abroad since 2020. Particular attention will be paid to Belarusians in Poland and the links between the historic Belarusian minority and the new diaspora.
Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya also separately thanked PACE for the Luxembourg Solutions — a report containing a comprehensive set of recommendations for supporting Belarusians in exile, which is used in engagement with European governments.
