Constitutional Court checks lists of people forbidden to go abroad and does not find any violation

ERB has found out that the Constitutional Court checked lists of people forbidden to leave the country according to decisions of Minsk courts. It confirmed that everything was legal and citizens’ rights were not violated by it.
The judge of Constitutional Court Valyantsin Shuklin informed ERB about it.

Valyantsіn Shuklіn: “We checked Minsk cases in many courts. We came to the conclusion that everything was grounded. We thought there was some serious problem with violation of citizens’ rights but we checked everything, looked through cases and we saw there was no problem like that. We think that those temporary limitations existing at the moment are grounded”.

The judge says that there should not be such a clamor against the list of people forbidden to go abroad. The only thing that has changed is that the old scattered lists have been united into one data base frontier guards have direct access to.

Valyantsіn Shuklіn: “Lists of people forbidden to go abroad existed and have remained. The number of people who were forbidden to go abroad. The only problem is that those lists used to belong to one or two organizations. It required a lot of effort to unite those data bases and to add them to the data base of frontier guards”.

He said it all cost only 10 or 15 million dollars. Only to ensure that citizens could avoid waiting in queues for several weeks to get an answer from all organizations and to get a permit but to find it out in several minutes. You just have to look though the single data base. Moreover, according to the law, everyone added to the data base has to be informed about it.

Unlike the current judge, the former judge of the Constitutional Court Valery Fadzeeu thinks that a lot of people are forbidden to go abroad in our country. Organizations having the right to compose the list can use the right on rather a lot of occasions.

Valery Fadzeeu: “There is a law, and there are ways of using it. There is the legal norm but it can be interpreted in many ways in practice and then problems arise. It mainly concerns citizens that were noticed for their political activities”.

As ERB informed, an investigator can add a person on the list of people forbidden to go abroad if he likes, be it the accused, the suspect or even the witness. The former judge thinks that an accused whose sentence has not been pronounced yet should not be added on the list. It limits his or her rights.

Valery Fadzeeu: “Speaking about it, the rights of the accused, but not the convict, should not be limited. You can say he might disappear but we should protect human rights in the first place”.