PRESS CONFERENCE BY FOREIGN MINISTER OF BELARUS

Press Briefing

PRESS CONFERENCE BY FOREIGN MINISTER OF BELARUS

At a Headquarters press conference this afternoon, the Minister for Foreign Affairs of Belarus, Ivan Antonovich, told reporters that the Union between his country and the Russian Federation was not a threat, but an important part of the overall process of European integration.

He said the Union of Belarus and Russia, which was concluded in April this year, had been the object of heated public controversy, from within the two countries, and from Europe and elsewhere. Many opponents thought the Union was dangerous, as it raised the prospect of the restoration of the former Soviet Union. However, the Union was a form of subregional integration, in line with the international processes of economic, social and political integration, in particular the European Union.

Most of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) countries, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, he said, had been economically backward and socially unstable. Politically, the institutions of democratic life had not yet taken full shape. The political field was still highly contested and some parties were calling for a return to policies from the past, "not only out of nostalgia, but out of ideological persuasions". There were those who had expected that after the collapse of the Soviet Union the CIS countries would automatically reach the standards of the most developed countries in the world. Those who were more realistic knew there was much work to be done to overcome the backwardness and be economically, socially and politically compatible with the rest of Europe.

The Foreign Minister said those realists, and others who had taken the trouble to read the treaty and the charter of the Union between Belarus and Russia, would have seen that much of the language and most of the legal atmosphere was taken -- sometimes by whole paragraphs -- from the Maastricht Treaty. The aim of the Union was to achieve economic, social and political compatibility with the general European integration process. He added that although the Union was not developing smoothly, it was nonetheless coming to life.

A correspondent asked why Pavel Sheremet had not been released before the court verdict on whether or not he was guilty. Mr. Antonovich said he had received news today that the man who was investigating the case thought it was premature to release Mr. Sheremet on bail because many of the issues to be brought before the court were not yet ready.

On the subject of freedom of the press, a correspondent asked the Foreign Minister to comment on the seizure by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) troops of television facilities in Bosnia and Herzegovina. He replied that he had read about the seizure today in The New York Times, and

Belarus Press Conference - 2 - 2 October 1997

he had been surprised by it, but that it was up to the United Nations and the Security Council to consider such cases.

Within the context of the Union between Belarus and the Russian Federation, would there be measures to step up standards on human rights? a correspondent asked. Belarus was a member of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, replied Mr. Antonovich, and he personally was a member of the United Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Belarus had recently been visited by about two dozen commissions on human rights, and their reports had been widely divergent. Some had been critical, and some not. The most comprehensive report had been issued by the United States State Department, and, for the first time his country's reply to the analysis had not been a rebuttal, but a form of dialogue.

Belarus, he continued, had recognized several serious problems on the issue of human rights; the overcrowding of prisons and delays in court procedures, for example, but those were universal problems. Belarus did not have a specifically negative record on human rights. There had been some individual cases of arrests that had been against the law, and these were being investigated, but "we would not say that these events place our country somewhere apart from the other European countries in terms of human rights records". He added, "Such things happen everywhere". Belarus had a normally functioning civil society without ethnic, religious or other strife.

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