Constitutional Court Proposes Parliament to Specify “Insult of President and Duty Officials” Notion

04.09.2003.

Based on BelaPAN information

The reasons for consideration of this question was the appeal of the Belarusian Association of Journalists, which proposed the Constitutional Court to decide whether the Articles No. 367 (defamation of President of Belarus), 368 (insult of Presidential honor and dignity) and 369 (insult of power representative) of the Criminal Code of Belarus corresponded to the Constitution.

We should remind that for the recent years several people have been punished on these articles, including the three journalists, Mikola Markevich, Pavel Mazheyka and Viktar Ivashkevich.

According to the Constitutional Court, the question of BAJ concerned more the issue of “finding the traits of crime in practice”.

That’s why the Constitutional Court recommended the Parliament to adopt some amendments to the Criminal Code so that “critical remarks related to power representatives, but without distribution of false and insulting insinuations or purposeful disparagement in an obscene form, weren’t considered as a crime. The proposition letter has been already filed to the National Assembly of Belarus.

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