Belarusian capital has been fined the equivalent of 30 times the minimum wage for "organizing religious services without state permission" human rights watchers said Wednesday, March 23. The news agency of human rights watchdog Forum 18 said Pastor Vyacheslav Goncharenko of the embattled Minsk-based New Life Church received the fine of 330 US dollars Tuesday March 22, after a brief, "closed" hearing at Minsk’s Moscow district court.
150 believers accompanying the pastor were not allowed to attend the hearing, Forum 18 News Service (F18News) quoted church administrator Vasily Yurevich as saying. Yurevich was himself fined on similar charges last year and New Life received an official warning in December 2004 that it could face closure under Belarusian law, F18News said.
APPEAL PLANNED
New Life is planning to appeal the fine and is also "preparing formal complaints to the Belarusian Ministry of Justice and Ministry of Internal Affairs regarding irregular court procedure and police behavior respectively," Yurevich told F18News. "The police treated church members roughly and tried to force them to leave the courthouse," he reportedly said.
As it was refused rental of premises by every district administration in Minsk the 600-strong New Life congregation has been forced to meet for worship at a disused cowshed it purchased in 2002. Officials say however that they will also not allow worship at the cowshed as "you can only keep cows in a cowshed," F18News reported.
But they cannot reconstruct the building "due to the absence of a prayer house in municipal plans to develop the area already approved by President Aleksandr Lukashenko," F18News said. Under Lukashenko the country developed what human rights watchers describe as Europe’s "most restrictive religious policy".
MORE PROSECUTION
"Non-registered religious communities are banned under Belarusian law and liable to prosecution, against international law," Forum 18 said in a recent report. However despite the reported pressures "the number of unregistered communities appears to have grown," it noted.
"A key feature of state religious policy is an extensive centralized network monitoring religious communities and active religious believers. There has been at least one attempt by the secret police to persuade a pastor to collaborate with them," Forum 18 said.
However a government report in a March 2000 described a church like New Life as a "neo-mystical religious-political destructive sect" whose growth poses "a significant threat to the individual, society and state", reported F18News. The United States and the European Union have in the past expressed concern about the religious and political situation in the former Soviet republic.
(With: BosNewsLife Research in Budapest, reports from Minsk, Forum 18, Stefan J. Bos)
