Risk Zone: Youth Activism in Belarus
The Belarusian Students’ Association (BSA) prepared an input for the UNGA-81st thematic report on “Freedom of Peaceful Assembly and of Association Youth Activism Report: Gen-Z Activism and the Future of Civic Space”. We analyzed the role of digital tools used to mobilize protests in 2020, as well as the repressive measures in response from the state, including internet shutdowns and digital surveillance.
In 2020, Telegram became the main platform for coordinating protests, providing for the rapid dissemination of information and strengthening horizontal connections among protesters. In addition to messengers, online projects for alternative vote counting (“Voice”) and monitoring violations (“Zubr”, “Honest People”) played an important role.
The state employs a wide range of technical control measures, including deliberate internet access restrictions, traffic filtering using Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) technology, and the use of mobile billing data as evidence in court. There have also been documented cases of using digital provocations in chats to fabricate criminal cases.
The authorities actively use articles of the Criminal Code on “extremist organizations”, “calls for sanctions”, and “insulting officials” to persecute people for virtually any online activity. Lists of “extremist materials” are updated monthly, making the repression constant.
The space for independent student initiatives within the country has been virtually destroyed; organizations, including BSA, have been declared “extremist” and forced to operate in exile. Students are systematically expelled for political reasons and subjected to criminal prosecution. The most prominent example of this was the “Student Case”.
Instead of genuine student participation in university governance, authorities use youth organisations under their control to create a “tokenism of representation” and to organise staged mass actions in support of the regime.
The official discourse is paternalistic in nature: the authorities deny that young people possess critical thinking, portraying their protest activities as the result of manipulation, coordination and funding by foreign actors.
To date, individual measures to protect the rights of young people are impossible without comprehensive democratic reforms in the country and the implementation of the principles of the Bologna Process in the field of education.
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