Two days after a candidate for the Parliament Aliaksandr Kabanau had passed his electoral program “Lukashenka is a deadlock. Fair elections are a way out of this deadlock” to the Biaroza district state-owned newspaper “Mayak” he received a telephone call from the chief editor, Aliaksandr Ivanou, who blankly demanded that the title of the program be changed, saying that otherwise it wouldn’t be published at all.

This made the candidate indignant, because when he passed the program to the newspaper he made a concession to the editor’s demands, agreeing that four points will be crossed out of the program (the call to boycott, the information that the candidate will withdraw from the election and the slogans “If you want to have fair elections - don’t take part in unfair ones” and “Participation in elections when there are political prisoners in the country is simply immoral”), but the heading won’t be changed.

Aliaksandr Kabanau warned the editor about legal responsibility for the change of the name of the electoral program without his consent or the failure to publish it.

“Human Rights Defenders for Free Elections”