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Iryna Khalip: Police told me to tear up my application for permission to travel abroad

Journalist Iryna Khalip said during a meeting in Minsk on Friday that police officers had suggested off the record that she had better tear up her application for permission to stay abroad for two weeks.

"My status has not changed," Ms. Khalip said, according to the Belarus Service of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. "I'm on probation with a suspended prison term. When the two-year term is over, my case will be heard again and the court will decide whether to release me or send me to a correctional institution for two years. If I go somewhere without permission, I'll definitely be put behind bars. As for the application, it's been more than two weeks since I filed it. When I come to report to the police, they tell me off the record that I had better tear up the paper."

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, a journalist for The Independent, 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 a BelaPAN correspondent 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. //BelaPAN