• As in previous years, Belarus remained a consolidated, highly centralized authoritarian regime ruled by President Aliaksandr Lukashenka, who marked 25 years in office in 2019. The president and his administration exercise unchallenged power in the country, with no meaningful legislative or judicial checks. The year itself did not see any significant changes in the regime’s functioning or in the country’s political climate. The government, run by the market-oriented prime minister Siarhei Roumas, has failed to deliver notable economic reforms due to the president’s reluctance to allow a painful economic transformation, especially before two election campaigns.
• In foreign policy, Belarus deepened its dialogue with the European Union (EU) and the United States. Washington and Minsk announced an exchange of ambassadors after an 11-year break.1 The lack of domestic human rights progress limited the potential of this rapprochement. On the other front, Minsk engaged in tense negotiations with Moscow on the terms of future integration and economic relations. During this process, the authorities increasingly adopted pro-sovereignty rhetoric. Belarus continued to pitch itself as a venue for regional peace talks and offered to deploy peacekeepers in war-torn eastern Ukraine.2
• In March, President Lukashenka announced plans to change the constitution.3 His intention is to delegate some powers from the president to the government and the parliament, as well as change the electoral system to increase the role of political parties, which are essentially invisible due in part to Belarus’s first-past-the-post system for parliamentary and local elections. The Constitutional Court was tasked with preparing proposals for these changes and passed them to Lukashenka by the end of the year.4 Yet, no further steps were taken in this direction in 2019. President Lukashenka himself explained that he did not wish to leave his future successor with the current president-centered constitution.5 He set 2024 as a deadline for constitutional revision.6 It is too early to say if plans for this revision and a transition of power will come to pass in the foreseeable future or if the president will be distracted by domestic crises and thus postpone the changes.
• There were no nationwide or large-scale protests in 2019, apart from a series of demonstrations against integration with Russia in December, the largest of which had over 1,000 participants (see “Civil Society”). Consequently, the government had no need to resort to mass repression, and the number of administrative arrests and fines for political activities actually fell in comparison to 2018.7 At the same time, there were instances of preventive detentions of activists before weekly protests against the construction of a battery factory in the city of Brest.8 Several criminal cases were opened against the activists and leaders of this local movement.9 The repression subsided by summer, when local and central authorities took the protesters’ side and halted the factory’s construction.
• The only two sitting opposition members of parliament (MPs), who won their seats in 2016, were barred from running in the 2019 parliamentary elections. No new opposition representatives entered the National Assembly. The number of MPs representing political parties increased from 16 in 2016 to 21 in 2019 (the remaining MPs are unaffiliated), with the Belarusian Communist Party receiving 11 out of 110 mandates. Evidently, this result constitutes another move toward increasing the role of parties, albeit completely loyalist ones.

• The government introduced no changes to electoral legislation in 2019, which, for a long time, has been criticized by international and domestic observation groups for imposing “restrictions on voter and candidacy rights, insufficient safeguards for voting and counting, as well as limitations on observer rights.”10 In April, President Lukashenka foreclosed the possibility of electoral reform, claiming that it should not be done during election years.11 The head of the Central Election Commission (CEC), Lidziya Yarmoshina, claimed that the upcoming revision of the constitution might entail the modernization of the electoral system.12
• The system currently in place allows the executive to control all stages of the electoral process. Electoral commissions on all levels are formed by executive committees (local administration bodies) that allow only minimal opposition representation.
• On August 5, the president set November 17 as the date for parliamentary elections.13 The opposition and human rights groups criticized the move because it effectively cut short the term of the sitting National Assembly by nearly 10 months.14 CEC head Yarmoshina explained that holding two elections in 2020—both parliamentary and presidential—would “over-politicize” society.15
• During the parliamentary campaign, just 2.5 percent of the members of district and territorial commissions represented the opposition.16 These commissions tabulate the final results after receiving vote totals from base-level precinct electoral commissions (PECs).
• The share of opposition in the PECs fell to new lows as compared to previous parliamentary elections. PECs do the vote-counting, and most instances of nontransparency and fraud are usually reported on this level. Out of 63,646 PEC members, only 21 (0.033 percent) were from opposition parties (this figure was 61 in 2012 and 53 in 2016). A selective approach to the appointment of PEC members was evident: progovernmental parties and public associations saw 96 to 97 percent of their nominees included in PECs, while the enrollment rate for opposition parties was 4.2 percent. Most of the rejected enrollments were either explained by the opposition nominees’ “lack of experience in electoral commissions” or not explained at all.17
• One could become a candidate by collecting 1,000 signatures, being nominated by a party, or being nominated by a “labor collective” (used by state-backed nominees); 78 percent of those nominated by opposition parties and 90 percent of those nominated by loyalist parties were granted registrations.18 Among those nominees who collected signatures, the rejection rate was much higher, that is, 47 percent (37 percent in 2016).19 Some of the most prominent opposition politicians, including the two sitting opposition MPs, Anna Kanapatskaya and Alena Anisim, were denied registration due to technical mistakes and printing errors in their signature collection lists.20 In total, 14 candidates were deregistered, a stark increase from only 1 deregistration in both the 2012 and 2016 campaigns.21 Several were deregistered after their TV appearances were censored because they had directly criticized the president or for minor election procedure violations (like sharing their business cards with voters instead of handing them duly printed leaflets that conformed with the electoral code).
• Independent observers reported widespread fabrication by PECs in order to inflate the real turnout.22 One of the most widely used methods of inflating the turnout was forcing students who live in state-owned dormitories to vote during early voting.23 According to the CEC, after five days of early voting, the turnout reached a record 35.8 percent.24
• During the voting, about 70 observers were removed from polling stations; this was a record number, as even officials admitted.25 Some opposition-affiliated observers were detained by police for demanding a recount.26 Several instances of alleged ballot stuffing were reported by media,27 domestic observers,28 and OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) observers.29 The ballot count was traditionally nontransparent, as the various commissions only reported their final calculations and no meaningful independent control in counting ballots was allowed.
• The OSCE ODIHR mission concluded that the elections “proceeded calmly but did not meet important international standards for democratic elections.” The mission also noted an overall “disregard for fundamental freedoms of assembly, association and expression.”30

• Formally, it is possible to register a nongovernmental organization (NGO) in Belarus. According to official data, more than 3,000 public associations, 15 political parties, and 28 trade unions were operating in Belarus as of October 2019.31 In practice, many political and legal restrictions limit the ability of NGOs, and civil society in general, to function. They include complicated and often arbitrary registration processes, high penalties for activity without registration, restricted access to foreign funding, and unequal treatment by the government.
• In July 2019, the infamous Article 193.1 of the criminal code, which criminalizes the activities of unregistered NGOs, became invalid.32 Since 2005, 18 individuals have received various penalties under this article, while dozens more activists were officially threatened with prosecution by law enforcement.33 Criminal responsibility for the activities of unregistered NGOs was replaced by administrative liability, which can result in fines up to $630. The Ministries of Interior and Justice can issue these fines without a court ruling. No such instances were reported in 2019.
• Amendments to legislation on mass events entered into force in January 2019. These scrapped the need to receive permission for organizing demonstrations in specifically defined locations.34 Local authorities designate these locations, which are usually in remote districts, like desolated parks. Following the president’s instruction, the authorities did not permit an opposition rally on March 25 (Freedom Day) in the center of the capital Minsk, forcing some organizers to move celebrations to the city of Hrodna (Grodno).35 More than 15 activists and musicians who tried to hold unauthorized events that day were detained, either preemptively or on the spot.36 All but three were released by the end of the day and subsequently fined. The government also set fees for holding mass events. The money is supposed to cover the cost of policing, medical support, and cleaning services.37 The size of the fee exceeds $4,500 for large demonstrations. This restriction forced several opposition groups to drop their plans for protest rallies, including the annual Chernobyl Way, due to a lack of resources.38 When those involved in organizing Freedom Day celebrations in Minsk refused to pay their fees because the police detained two activists, the interior ministry forced them to do so via a court order.39
• In December, unauthorized protests against integration with Russia erupted in Minsk and other cities (including Hrodna, Pinsk, and Lida). More than 1,000 people took part in the largest rally in Minsk on December 20.40 Police neither intervened in the protests nor arrested attendees. However, by the end of the month, the leaders of the movement were punished with 5 to 15 days of detention (in 12 cases) and fines (in more than 70 cases).41 The repression continued into January 2020, despite the suspension of demonstrations.
• In May 2019, the justice ministry established a working group on amendments to the laws on public associations and political parties. An opposition politician, Ihar Barysau, and the head of the Belarusian Helsinki Committee, Aleh Hulak, were invited to join the working group.42 The amendments were mostly technical in nature. When adopted, they will update and simplify registration procedures for public associations and political parties but also require them to publish financial reports. After criticism from civil society, the authorities dropped the most controversial proposed amendment, which would have introduced a limit on how much NGOs may spend on employee salaries.43
• On May 16, dozens of Roma were detained and reportedly beaten during police raids on two Roma-populated villages near the city of Mahileu (Mogilev)44 as part of an investigation into the death of a traffic officer who was later found to have committed suicide. Interior Minister Ihar Shunevich bluntly refused to apologize,45 but he later resigned and was criticized for the “Roma incident” by the president.46 However, no legal remedies followed the raids, as the Prosecutor General’s Office concluded that ethnic profiling was justified given the information the police had at the moment.47 The Roma community faces pervasive discrimination in Belarus, especially regarding employment and ethnic profiling by police, which were reported by 80 percent of Roma respondents in a 2019 survey.48
• In April, the largest independent labor union at the Belaruskali state-run enterprise reported unprecedented pressure by administrators on its members, who were threatened with termination if they did not leave the union. More than 600 of the union’s 4,000 union members left.49 The administration of Belaruskali denied any involvement in the mass exodus. Earlier, in January, the government registered an independent local trade union for the first time after activists complained to the International Labour Organization (ILO).50
• Authorities continued to invite civil society organizations (CSOs) to meetings of the Belarus-EU Human Rights Dialogue51 and the Belarus-EU Coordination Group.52 NGO representatives were able to voice their opinions in these forums, though some of them reported being excluded from the most sensitive parts of the discussions.53

• Independent media in Belarus continued to operate in a hostile political and legal environment amid strained financial conditions. In addition to full control over TV, radio, and most political newspapers, the government tightened its grip over online media and free speech in general. At the same time, the scale of repression against individual journalists decreased in 2019 as compared to previous years.
• On March 4, Maryna Zolatava, the editor-in-chief of the most popular Belarusian independent news portal, TUT.by, was found guilty of “executive inaction” in the “BelTA” case.54 Altogether, 15 journalists and editors from nonstate media had been subjected to prosecution in the second half of 2018 as part of this case for allegedly using unduly obtained passwords to access the newsfeed of the state news agency, BelTA. Of these, 14 were released from criminal liability after admitting wrongdoing and paying fines. Zolatava was tried for failing to stop her subordinates from using the BelTA passwords, and ultimately was fined and ordered to pay $6,800 for BelTA’s legal costs. The case was widely seen as politically motivated and interpreted as an attempt to punish TUT.by and other independent media for their growing popularity.
• Defamation is criminalized in Belarus, where the law prescribes harsher punishments when officials or the president are defamed (up to two years in prison in the latter case). On April 9, police raided the Minsk office of the Polish-based satellite TV channel Belsat and seized its equipment as part of a criminal investigation into alleged libel against a Belarusian official.55 This case had not been closed by year’s end. In November, a court fined the owners of the popular opposition website BelarusPartisan.by and a regional outlet, Vecherny Bobruisk, for discrediting the honor, dignity, and business reputation of the head of the Slonim District Executive Committee.56 These media republished a defamatory post by the popular blogger Stsiapan Putsila (aka “NEXTA”) on his Telegram channel. NEXTA was also fined, but since he lives in Poland, the state cannot enforce this sanction.
• Reporters from Belsat and Radio Racyja (also headquartered in Poland) continued to be harassed and persecuted for working in Belarus without accreditation, which the government refuses to grant. However, the intensity of the harassment significantly decreased, with journalists fined 44 times in 2019 as compared to 118 times in 2018.57
• Several criminal cases were launched against bloggers during the year. In March, video blogger Andrei Pavuk, from the town of Aktsiabrski, was detained and charged with falsely reporting a bomb threat at a local executive committee building. The charges were dropped a month later.58 When Pavuk attempted to get compensation for moral harm through the courts, he received anonymous threats.59 Another anticorruption blogger, Siarhei Piatrukhin, was found guilty of insulting police officers and ordered to pay the equivalent of $8,630 in April.60
• On December 26–27, video bloggers Siarhei Tsihanouski and Dzmitry Kazlou were detained for 15 days each after they livestreamed protests in Minsk against Belarusian integration with Russia (see “Civil Society”).61 Both vloggers were arrested for taking part in an unauthorized mass event.
• Authorities obstructed the work of journalists during the parliamentary campaign. Reporters from the German TV channel ARD were briefly detained when they attempted to cover an opposition rally in Minsk on November 8.62 Unidentified men suspected to be plainclothes police officers damaged camera equipment belonging to RFE/RL as its reporters covered another demonstration on November 16.63
• At least two activists were fined for sharing anarchist materials on social media.64 The authorities also expanded the scope of anti-extremist legislation, introducing criminal penalties for the rehabilitation of Nazism and administrative penalties for sharing extremist symbols.65 New restrictions also prohibit the display of symbols used by groups that collaborated with the Nazis during World War II. If interpreted literally, this provision outlaws the white-red-white flag commonly used by the opposition.66
• According to the IREX 2019 Media Sustainability Index, the quality and financial health of Belarus’s independent media has improved.67 In addition, the year saw a significant increase in the popularity of political bloggers on Telegram and YouTube. One of the most prominent, NEXTA, produced a documentary critical of President Lukashenka, which garnered more than 2 million views on YouTube and other platforms. This film was later designated extremist material,68 which resulted in a ban on the documentary’s further distribution.

• Local governance in Belarus is highly centralized. The president personally appoints and dismisses all heads of territorial entities down to the district level.69 Local self-government bodies—namely, local councils—are financially and legally constrained; they act as consultative adjuncts to local executive committees, whose decision-making power is, in turn, directed by the central government.70 Local councils approve local budgets, rates of local taxes, and rules for the use of local public property, while the executive committees prepare draft budgets, perform actual management tasks, and represent their regions in relationship with other state bodies.71 Local councils have no influence over the appointment of heads of the local executive committees. Belarus is the only European nation that is not a party to the European Charter of Local Self-Government.72
• Local authorities get most of their funding from the central government. The allocation of funding is based on “social standards” set by various ministries, which often do not account for local specificities.73 The economic gap between the capital Minsk and the regions continued to grow in 2019.74
• Local authorities fully implement the central government’s repressive measures, restricting freedoms of assembly and association. For example, the Brest District Executive Committee on numerous occasions prohibited rallies against the construction of a battery plant.75 When anti-construction activists tried to register an NGO, their application was rejected on technicalities.76 Unlike in 2018, the Minsk City Executive Committee in 2019 did not allow the opposition to celebrate its main political holiday—Freedom Day—in the city center, forcing organizers to move the event to Hrodna (see “Civil Society”).77 Municipal authorities in Vitebsk did not permit local activists to hold an Immortal Regiment demonstration commemorating victims of WWII following President Lukashenka’s negative assessment of this movement.78 The Minsk City Executive Committee also refused to register the Immortal Regiment movement as a public association.79
• Some individual heads of local executive committees took a more engaging approach to civil society in 2019. Brest mayor Alexander Rogachuk several times invited anti-construction activists to the city’s concert hall to discuss their demands.80 The head of the presidential administration, Natalya Kochanova, repeatedly called upon the heads of local executive committees to be fair and open to ordinary people, and to regularly meet with citizens in person.81
• Several senior officials supported the idea of transferring more power to local levels of government. In April, President Lukashenka said the authorities would move toward a system with greater autonomy for local self-government bodies.82 In May, the head of the CEC spoke in favor of electing the heads of local executive committees and city mayors, who are currently elected by members of local councils (at the lowest level) or otherwise appointed by the president.83 These initiatives, however, have not progressed.84
• The government is considering plans for reforming the administrative structure of the country, with one option involving its division into 18 counties instead of the current 6 oblasts.85 Officially, the idea is to stimulate regional development by bringing decision-making centers closer to more people, and the government stated that it would pursue these plans after the national census in late 2019.

• The judicial system in Belarus operates under the near-total control of the executive branch. Apart from 6 out of the 12 justices of the Constitutional Court, the president also appoints and dismisses all judges in the country.86 He regularly uses both of these powers,87 yet the judicial system did not undergo any changes in 2019. Judges retain some independence when it comes to routine cases, but in politically motivated trials, the outcome can be predicted based on the whims of the regime at any given moment.
• Once a criminal case reaches court, the defendant will almost certainly be found guilty. Less than 0.3 percent of verdicts in criminal trials in 2019 were acquittals.88 For many years, representatives of the judiciary have attributed this consistently low figure to law enforcement agencies’ prudent work.89
• Beyond formal control, the executive interferes with the judiciary informally. In several high-profile trials, courts issued rulings or overturned previous decisions right after President Lukashenka publicly expressed his position on them.90 The president also tasked the Constitutional Court with drafting a new version of the constitution, an atypical job for this body.91
• The president frequently directs law enforcement agencies to launch criminal investigations and arrest mid-level officials and managers of state enterprises for poor performance.92
• In August 2019, the president was involved in calming tensions between two law enforcement bodies (the Ministry of Interior and the Investigative Committee) and the judiciary. The head of the Supreme Court complained that law enforcement officers had tried to put pressure on judges in an infamous corruption case in which the defendant was twice found innocent after spending a total of more than four years in pretrial detention.93 Taking the side of the courts, President Lukashenka publicly shamed and castigated law enforcement officials for abusing their power.94 Most likely, the president took this hard line because the media had consistently covered and criticized law enforcement agencies for their overly punitive approach, which has included frequent and lengthy pretrial arrests of business executives, police brutality, and harsh antidrug policies.
• Belarus is the only country in Europe that still applies the death penalty, a practice the CoE and EU consistently criticize.95 Executions are carried out in a secretive manner: relatives of executed convicts, whose bodies are buried in undisclosed locations, only learn about executions post factum.96 A number of executions take place while complaints are under active consideration in the United Nations (UN) Human Rights Committee. There were three known death sentences and three executions in 2019.97
• During the year, the judiciary did take certain steps to become more transparent and to digitalize its operations. Press officers of the courts, including the Supreme Court, are now active online and on social media. In 2019, they continued to publish key decisions and regular overviews of judicial practice on their websites. Following the president’s instructions in April, the Supreme Court directed other courts to make audio and video recordings of all trials starting on January 1, 2020.98

• The workings of the state in Belarus are closed and nontransparent. Independent media and NGOs lack access to public procurement data or income declarations for officials. Hence, civil society’s oversight of corruption is virtually nonexistent. Government and law enforcement agencies remain the chief sources of data on corruption. During the first six months of 2019, 463 persons were found guilty of various corruption-related crimes (a 5-percent decrease in comparison to the first half of 2018). Of these, 206 individuals received real prison terms, according to Supreme Court statistics.99
• Since the beginning of his rule, President Lukashenka has viewed combatting corruption as his key source of legitimacy and public support. Hence, anticorruption legislation is regularly updated, and law enforcement agencies launch officially celebrated criminal cases to demonstrate their persistence in this area. Officials up to the highest echelons of power, and even the richest businesspeople, are not immune from being investigated and jailed for corruption. However, there is a formalized practice of securing President Lukashenka’s approval before detaining top-level officials from the so-called presidential personnel reserve for corruption or other charges.100 Petty bribery is not widespread due to the high risks it bears.
• On May 10, the president adopted a decree that prohibits the release on parole of those individuals convicted of corruption.101 Presenting this decree to the National Assembly, Prosecutor General Aliaksandr Kaniuk proposed that all officials publish their income declarations, but this idea was not included in new legislation.102
• A number of high-profile anticorruption investigations and trials occurred in 2019. The most notable was the so-called doctors case in which dozens of senior healthcare officials, including the Deputy Minister of Health, heads of hospitals, and businesspeople were put on trial and received prison terms for bribery in the procurement of medicine and medical equipment.103 Separately, in July, the president’s former assistant Siarhei Rauneika was sentenced to 12 years in prison for bribery.104 In late April, the former chief of the president’s security service and the deputy head of the Security Council, Andrei Vtsiurin, together with the head of the state corporation Beltelecom and about 10 others, were arrested for corruption.105
• Belarus’s score in Transparency International’s 2019 Corruption Perceptions Index was 45 out of 100, putting it in 68th place out of 198 countries.106 This is a higher ranking than most post-Soviet nations but lower than most of the post-socialist countries of the EU. An independent poll of small and medium business owners in Belarus reported that corruption was perceived as an essential barrier to doing business by 19.5 percent of respondents (a small increase from 16.1 percent in 2018).107
• In March, the CoE’s Group of States against Corruption (GRECO) declared Belarus noncompliant with the organization’s anticorruption standards.108 It was the first such declaration ever made by GRECO with respect to one of its member states. The organization reported that Belarus had failed to implement 20 out of 24 long-standing recommendations and that it had prevented the organization from publishing any evaluations of in-country anticorruption measures. GRECO concluded that it was hard to estimate the real scale of corruption in Belarus and criticized the extensive powers of the president, the lack of transparency in public administration, and insufficient guarantees of judicial and prosecutorial independence.

Author: Artyom Shraibman is a Belarusian political analyst and founder of the consultancy Sense Analytics. He contributes frequently to TUT.by, Carnegie.ru, and LibMod.de. He holds an LLB in International Law (Belarusian State University) and MSc in Politics and Communications (London School of Economics). Shraibman has worked as a political journalist in Belarus for over five years.

Note

The ratings reflect the consensus of Freedom House, its academic advisers, and the author(s) of this report. The opinions expressed in this report are those of the author(s). The ratings are based on a scale of 1 to 7, with 7 representing the highest level of democratic progress and 1 the lowest. The Democracy Score is an average of ratings for the categories tracked in a given year. The Democracy Percentage, introduced in 2020, is a translation of the Democracy Score to the 0–100 scale, where 0 equals least democratic and 100 equals most democratic.