My previous trial

1. Please can you tell us what offence (and under what statute) you were found guilty of at your trial? Offence was that we had non permitted religious meeting. Codex of Administrative Delict article 167-1 part one

2. What was the date of the trial? The trial was at November, 24 2005

3. What was the sentence of the court? The sentence of the court was – guilty in organization of religious meeting. Penalty – warning.

4. Are you still planning to appeal against this? We did, but higher court agreed with previous sentence (January 10 2006; No 4-A-610/22)

5. Was this your first time in court? Yes, It was the first official court.

Your next court appearance

6. You mention in your email that you will be in court again in a month or so – have you been charged with another crime? We do not know about the date, we were not informed yet. But police made the same documents as for the previous court. We have to be fined for the second time. This is a practice.

7. If so, what is this?

8. What outcome do you anticipate? We have the highest law – Constitution (Article 137. The Constitution shall have the supreme legal force. Laws, decrees, ordinances and other instruments of state bodies shall be promulgated on the basis of, and in accordance with the Constitution of the Republic of Belarus). According the Constitution we have rights for worship (Article 31. Everyone shall have the right independently to determine one's attitude towards religion, to profess any religion individually or jointly with others, or to profess none at all, to express and spread beliefs connected with one's attitude towards religion, and to participate in the performance of acts of worship and religious rituals and rites, which are not prohibited by the law). Article 33. Everyone is guaranteed freedom of thoughts and beliefs and their free expression.

No one shall be forced to express one's beliefs or to deny them.

No monopolization of the mass media by the State, public associations or individual citizens and no censorship shall be permitted.

Police action

9. You mention that police have broken into church 3 times. Please can you give the dates and what happened on each occasion. (May, 26 2005 photos are in a magazine – there were threatens; October, 30 2005, police came into private home with permission, they made papers for court; February 5, 2006, a civil official man came into private house without permission (Article 29. The right of the people to be secure in their houses and other legitimate effects shall be guaranteed. No person shall have the right, save in due course of law to enter the premises or other legal property of a citizen against one's will) and began to make photos during prayer. He was followed by a policemen, who came into house without permission. Prayer was disrupt, as well as a worship)

Blocking worship

10. You say that worship will be blocked in a few months. What do you mean by this? What makes you think this will happen? (May 26, we could not continue worship, because behaviour of officials was quite rude, the same happened on February 2006).

Addresses

11. Our previous experience was that it was helpful to address letters using the Cyrillic script. Please could you let us have the addresses in this form. (Maybe a pdf or scan as we don’t have the script at our end.)

12. I notice you mention the Partizan district of Minsk – is this the area your church is in? What role does the district administration have in matters? They administrate police, and regional officials, here is our church situated.

Your church

13. Please can you give us the full address of your church (in English & Cyrillic) Bagrationa str. 30, Minsk

14. How many members to you have? 35 members

15. How many in the congregation (including members)? The same number

16. On what date was the church founded? March 1994

Belarus Embassy in London

17. Do you think it would help if we were also to write to the Belarus Embassy in London or the US? Good idea.