A/HRC/38/51 United Nations General Assembly Distr.: General 15 May 2018 Original: English Human Rights Council Thirty-eighth session 18 June–6 July 2018 Agenda item 4 Human rights situations that require the Council’s attention Report of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Belarus Note by the Secretariat The Secretariat has the honour to transmit to the Human Rights Council the report of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Belarus, prepared pursuant to Council resolution 35/27. In his concluding report to the Human Rights Council, Miklós Haraszti, the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Belarus, describes an unchanged oppressive environment for the rights and freedoms of citizens. During the six years since the Human Rights Council established the mandate of the Special Rapporteur, Belarus has been governed by a purposefully repressive legal framework, aggravated by regularly recurring, centrally planned violent crackdowns on peaceful demonstrators, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), political opponents, human rights activists and independent media workers. Imprisonment of political opponents on trumped-up charges has been cyclically employed by the authorities. The denial of the right to life has continued through the regular application of the death penalty. The Government has not addressed the following entrenched systemic human rights shortcomings analysed in 2011 by the then United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights: the absence of rule of law, the stifling of the expression of any dissenting view, the lack of media pluralism and the caseby-case authorizations-based regime of enjoyment of the right to the freedoms of association and peaceful assembly. The practice of depriving citizens of their civil and political rights continues to have a detrimental effect on the enjoyment of economic, social and cultural rights. Given that the human rights situation in Belarus continues to be marked by non-cooperation with the human rights mechanisms of the United Nations and noncompliance with their recommendations, the mandate of the Special Rapporteur needs to be renewed. GE.18-07820(E) 