A/HRC/38/51 23. The Special Rapporteur also welcomes the submission by Belarus of its fifth periodic report under article 40 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (CCPR/C/BLR/5), and recalls that the report had been pending for 16 years. In October 2018, the Human Rights Committee would thus have the opportunity to review the level of compliance of Belarus with the provisions of the Covenant 21 years after having previously done so, on 30 October 1997. 24. The Committee against Torture was scheduled to review the compliance of Belarus at its sixty-third session in May 2018, on the basis of the fifth periodic report (CAT/C/BLR/5) submitted by Belarus in response to the list of issues adopted by the Committee in 2013 (CAT/C/BLR/QPR/5). The review would provide an opportunity to assess the prevalence of torture and ill-treatment in Belarus, particularly in prison facilities, and, more broadly, acts committed by law enforcement officials. 25. The Special Rapporteur devoted large sections of his most recent report to the Human Rights Council to the assessment and analysis of the inter-agency plan for the period 2016–2019 for the implementation of recommendations made during the second cycle of the universal periodic review and by the treaty bodies, approved by the Council of Ministers on 24 October 2016. 26. On the occasion of the twenty-sixth session of the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly, held on 5 July 2017 in Minsk, the inter-agency plan was presented by the President of Belarus himself as being the most important element of systemic efforts to ensure citizen’s rights and freedoms as a whole.4 27. The plan, a list of activities mostly devoted to initiating institutional thinking about long-standing economic and social issues, falls far short of constituting a comprehensive national human rights action plan, as it ignores numerous fundamental recommendations made by various human rights mechanisms regarding civil and political rights. The Ministry for Foreign Affairs, which proclaims the indivisibility of human rights on its website,5 has been unable to translate that principle into reality. According to information available at the time of drafting of the present report, there was no implementation report available on the 100 or so points contained in the plan. IV. Human rights concerns A. Freedom of opinion and expression, and freedom of the media 28. At the time of drafting of the present report, the Government was processing amendments to the law on the mass media, the Tax Code, the Administrative Offences Code and the Code of Execution Procedure for Administrative Offences, dealing with the regulation of the media, including web-based outlets. The amendments were passed by the National Assembly on first reading on 19 April 2018. If finally approved, the amendments would further curtail the freedoms of expression and information of all citizens, increasing the hurdles and intimidation faced by Belarusian independent journalists and online content contributors.6 29. The draft amendments would provide for additional administrative fines of up to €500 and €5,000 respectively for individuals or entities that produce or disseminate information while not registered as journalists or media outlets. Under other amendments to the law on the mass media, web-based outlets would be subjected to the existing State-run, permission-based registration procedure for print media. Any online publication, including social media, could therefore be banned if it were not run by registered journalists, and the author or publisher would be held liable under the above-mentioned amendments. The 4 5 6 See http://mfa.gov.by/en/organizations/human_rights/. Ibid. See https://baj.by/en/content/baj-sent-its-comments-amendments-law-mass-media-parliament. 5