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Public Advisory Council under Presidential Administration holds maiden meeting

The recently established Public Advisory Council under the Presidential Administration held its first meeting on February 6.

The meeting, which lasted about two hours, focused on procedural issues and the agenda of the next three meetings, Aleh Hulak, chairman of the Belarusian Helsinki Committee who was in attendance, told BelaPAN.

"The council consists of 29 people who represent various non-governmental organizations and political groups," he said. "We discussed what the council is, how we see it, what we want of it, and how we are going to work."

"On the one hand, it is good that the work of the council will not be overregulated, on the other hand, there should be some procedure for making decisions," Mr. Hulak said. "It is expected to be devised at the next meeting."

The council is to hold three meetings before summer, Mr. Hulak said. The date of the next one has not yet been set, he added.

According to him, on the initiative of Stanislaw Bahdankevich, a former head of the National Bank of Belarus, the council decided that the next meeting should focus on the ongoing economic crisis and ways of overcoming it. The meeting after the next one is to address proposals to improve Belarus' electoral regulations, and the third meeting is to focus on ways of making criminal penalties in the country more humane, Mr. Hulak said.

"I'd like to note that the atmosphere of the meeting was quite acceptable, thanks, above all, to Uladzimir Makey, head of the Presidential Administration, who chaired the meeting," Mr. Hulak said. "I would say that the atmosphere was suitable for work."

“It was for the first time in many years that people of different convictions, political beliefs and ideologies gathered together at one table,” another participant, Aleh Trusaw, chairman of the Francisak Skaryna Belarusian Language Society, commented to BelaPAN. According to him, there were almost equal shares of the government’s representatives and others. Participants included trade union leaders, the chairpersons or deputy chairpersons of a number of standing committees of the House of Representatives, and the chief editors of the government-controlled newspapers Sovetskaya Belorussiya and Respublika.

“I proposed that the council should this year discuss the situation of the Belarusian language and the state of affairs in the education sphere, but this met with objections from some officials,” Mr. Trusaw said.

He described the atmosphere at the meeting as "rather constructive," but expressed disappointment that all participants but him had spoken in Russian.