Worth noting in all of this that Belarus recently closed their land borders to citizens [1], under the guise of COVID, but in reality to stop people leaving. The only way out was flying from Minsk, which is now even less of an option if there are no flights to the EU.
As others have said these sanctions will likely do more to harm the repressed citizens of the regime than Lukashenko
People (me and friends) reroute their travel through Moscow to get to Minsk now. Annoying but still i believe that this is a right decision from eu side.
just out of curiosity, are you worried that posts such as this one could land you in trouble at some point? or are you taking steps like using a VPN for this?
I am living outside of Belarus right now in a country with decent government, so i don't really worry about this. But ofc i use my own wireguard vpn and mtproto proxy for telegram when i am traveling to Belarus. I am not going to censor myself, but it pays to be cautious.
As proven by the fact that a regime critic just caused a plane to be diverted, living outside of Belarus is by itself unfortunately no longer a guarantee for safety. So please be very careful.
I am a nobody, Raman was a prominent opposition figure even before aug 2020 and ex-editor of NEXTA (biggest belarusian opposition channel on tg). He was arrested because of his relation to NEXTA. Me? I am just a dude, who works\lives abroad and has to deal with shit that my beloved leader pulls off.
Reason why people in Belarus are getting arrested for stuff like commenting/posting, is because they leave their bio\phone number\sensitive stuff open or do it on socials that are working with cops (viber, vk, whatsapp etc). HN is perfect because you can use 5 minute mail to create an account. Regular cops wont be able to dox you unless they have your phone. It is very different if you got attention from KGB or other dudes. But you have to be prominent enough to do that.
And finally. I can post/comment on HN as much as i want because HN is very far from being of any interest to cops. Small site, most days purely tech themed, that is 100% in english.
I've checked again, and most posts about fines\arrests that i was able to find were related to screenshots of groupchats, and no data requests were done to whatsapp itself. My bad.
Viber worked actively with cops while their head office was in Minsk, even after Rakuten acquisition.
VK, and other companies that are located in Russia, especially those that are owned by mail.ru group, are actively working with cops.
While it may vary by the government or jurisdiction in question, whatsapp is definitely compromised at the LE/Judicial level in some places. This leads me to believe that in fact it is universally compromised, though I have no direct evidence to support that conclusion.
Russia has murdered dissidents multiple times in foreign capitals in plain view (resulting in other civilian deaths) most recently the Novichok murders. They don't care about what the west thinks and likely approved this operation too.
That's not true actually. Not a fan of the modern Russia but a fan of accuracy. That plane was shot down by rebel Donbass forces by mistake. They were not well trained and mistook it for a military plane.
Good question. Who knows, all I know is that it is time to really de-escalate relations between the big power blocks. At the same time Western democracies have to put limits on what totalitarian regimes, true and wannabe ones, are allowed to get away with. These things seem to be mutually exclusive so. I always thought the Putin is the most dangerous and cunning leader the world currently has. I also thought that this cunning would prevent him from doing anything stupid. Not so sure anymore about the last bit anymore, given with what he got away with so far.
Don't ask me what Western powers should do so. Given the loss in soft power in the last decade, throwing out human rights by the EU during the refugee crisis and ever since, the new alliance between Israel and Saudi Arabia, Trumps foreign policy, options seem to be limited.
Nobody is going to ban Russia. Look at the map. How do you think they'd fly between EU and China/Japan? Over Russian territory. Case closed, even not talking about nukes and stuff, just on economic reasons. For heaven's sake, they are finishing a major gas pipeline between Russia and Germany (look up North Stream 2), what bans could there be? Russia is not Belarus (even though Belarus is definitely a puppet of Russia) and EU would not dare to go as far, however nice it would sound. And Putin knows that very well.
"As others have said these sanctions will likely do more to harm the repressed citizens of the regime than the Lukashenko"
I feel that that is true for almost all sanctions everywhere sadly. The Russians love their children too. In fact we have to really think hard on who they benefit, short and long term. Making markets more independent of each other is only making a war more likely. If goods don't cross borders armies will.
What is a better alternative? I don't know, but perhaps targeted educational pieces, like scientific papers to educate populations? Yeah it sounds like propaganda, but perhaps one can add methods to verify claims or something? Show how exactly a policy is detrimental to the population in question? It's a hard problem, I'm not claiming otherwise.
Bomb one of their airbases. Russia can annex Crimea with no real response, so why should the EU show restraint? (I am not suggesting a bombing campaign, just a targeted strike on the airbase from which the intercepting fighter jet departed.) What’s Russia going to do? They want that Nord Stream pipeline. They aren’t going to militarily respond over some two bit dictator, even one friendly to Russia. The Nord Stream energy revenue is probably going to be much higher than the entire Belorussian economy.
I'd like to see a worldwide agreement that no country will ever stop a citizen from leaving, as long as they have permission to enter another country.
Even if the person is in prison or debt, they can always leave with just themselves to another country willing to take them.
If all nations agreed to that, we could stop worrying about most other human rights abuses, and country governance becomes more of a free market. If you don't like your own system of government, you can move to another. Countries would have an incentive to treat their people well, or see a mass exodus.
>I'd like to see a worldwide agreement that no country will ever stop a citizen from leaving, as long as they have permission to enter another country.
It's in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Article 13 Section 2:
>Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.
Of course, it's not clear how much legal force the UDHR has.
> Of course, it's not clear how much legal force the UDHR has.
Depending on the jurisdiction. It has a lot of legal force in countries that are members of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR; violations go to that court if they are not satisified by local courts or other means of member states; member states usually respect the Court's decisions). Belarus applied for membership in 1993 but was never admitted, because well I think it's clear why.
They won't enforce it, they won't even say anything. Upon request they'll even hand over the names of people of interest to regimes that wish to execute or torture innocent people. See the UNHRs response to handing over names of Uighurs.
When you're talking about exit bans, that's something China is known for, and it's gotten bad enough that the US State Department mentions it. (That was a long time coming)
In Australia, it's currently a crime for citizens to leave without a permit. The system for permits is quite arbitrary, with some reporting approvals in minutes, and others reporting rejections without reason.
It is worth noting that a recent survey showed a vast majority of Australians preferring closed borders as we have been relatively unscathed from COVID.
>these rules are there to protect the minority, not the majority.
That's not clear.
Democracy protects the majority (but not always the minority); in an absence of democracy, the majority are also vulnerable to breaches of human rights.
> In Australia, it's currently a crime for citizens to leave without a permit.
As long as a country allows a citizen to leave, it doesn't matter if it's also against local laws. It simply means that the person should expect punishment if they were to ever return.
Currently, the quarantine system for returning residents is entirely overloaded. Leakage of cases from quarantine has been common, leading to snap lockdowns.
Additionally, there aren’t many commercial flights right now, resulting in the government needing to supplement these with charter flights (but needing to balance this with not further overloading quarantine facilities). Some people have been waiting six months or more to find a flight home or to get onto a charter flight. There are constant news stories about desperate people who are trapped with no way to fly back.
So, the government has decided you need a permit to leave, either stating you have no intention to return in the medium-term, need to leave for compassionate reasons, or have an urgent need to travel.
I entirely disagree with the policy. People should be free to leave, but then if they can’t find a flight home, that’s their issue.
However, the government seems concerned about the optics of seeing people on the nightly news, crying that the government won’t give them a seat on a charter flight.
Depends on cultural differences and their qualification.
For example basically noone complains about Ukrainian/Belarusian programmers working in Poland.
There is quite significant presence of Ukrainians in Poland and it is widely accepted and so far no major problems happened.
> On 14 September 2018, 33,624 Ukrainian citizens possessed a permanent residence permit, and 132,099 had a temporary residence permit.[4] About 1 to 2 million Ukrainian citizens are working in Poland.[5][6] There are also 40,000 Ukrainian students in Poland.[6]
How are you defining "economic refugee"? Lots of countries benefit from people coming to that country to work. In many cases, those people end up as net contributors to the public purse; the individual is better off, the recipient country is better off.
There are a few countries who will pretty much let anybody in. Migrants often bring with them skills that the locals don't have, and in any mass migration, those who migrate (vs stay where they are) tend to be the fitter, smarter, richer people.
The main reason not to take migrants is you might see substantial economic losses as migrants send income back home to support family. You might alienate your existing population with conflicting cultures. And with enough immigration, the migrants might eventually outnumber the original population and persecute them (eg. indian reservations).
It's all a tradeoff, but I suspect there always a few countries worldwide who will take anyone.
Canada has pretty high standards though. You need some combination of language proficiency, education, skills, youth, health, and wealth.
There are countries that will let "anybody" in. There are countries that take large numbers of immigrants. I seriously doubt there are countries that do both.
> in any mass migration, those who migrate (vs stay where they are) tend to be the fitter, smarter, richer people.
Completely not true. Look at the migrations to the EU, as well as to the US. The “smarter, fitter, richer” people aren’t mass migrating from Latin America. Not at any significant percentage at least.
Obviously they might not be smarter, fitter and richer than people at the place they're arriving at, and that is one of the major reasons immigration is often restricted.
> The “smarter, fitter, richer” people aren’t mass migrating from Latin America
Not mass migrating but it isn't completely untrue either here in the EU, I keep meeting other Latin Americans like me who emigrated away and plan to never come back. It has only grown the past 5 years, of course I'm in a bubble of tech workers but most of the engineers I know who got a job in the EU from Latin America are some of the smartest and richer ones.
you might see substantial economic losses as migrants send income back home to support family.
Is that a real problem? Assume they get paid in local currency (e.g. US dollars).
Option one; they buy a foreign currency with those US dollars, and send that foreign currency overseas. The dollars stay in the US and get spent.
Option two, they send those US dollars overseas; those US dollars ultimately either come back to the US to be spent (in which case the fact that they circled around the world matters as much as if they sat in a wallet in Utah for a year), or they never come back and the US is ahead on the deal, given that the worker did some work but US society will never need to hand over goods/services in exchange.
I guess my hypothesis is that either those US dollars get spent in the US, or they don't. If they do, it's just like a non-migrant worker. If they don't, US society got work done and didn't have to give back goods/services - bargain for US society.
A currency exchange is a zero sum transaction. Whether it is US dollars or Philippine pesos makes no difference, the value stayed in-country.
When it gets sent overseas, it leaves the country and is spent elsewhere, so that is a loss in value for the originating country. The only value remaining would be whatever fee was charged on its way out.
If the US prints a million dollars, and some does a million dollars' worth of work in the US (or someone outside the US sends over a shipload of electronics in exchange for that big back of dollars) and moves that million dollars overseas, and those dollars never come back to be spent in the US, the US has gained. The US got a whole lot of work done, and did not have to give anyone goods or services in exchange.
The US has been doing this with a trade deficit for decades; giving people paper (or just numbers), which the US can make almost for free, in exchange for actual goods and services which people overseas happily send to the US. A trade deficit is free stuff. It's only a problem if the holder of all that paper comes back some day to spend it.
"When it gets sent overseas, it leaves the country and is spent elsewhere, so that is a loss in value for the originating country."
What value? The US did not give anyone goods or services, no goods from the US were transported to another country. What value was lost to the US? In the future, someone might come back with those dollars and exchange them for goods and services which they move outside the US. That would be a loss of value for the US, watching real goods and services go overseas.
I disagree. A lot of the US dollars that are held outside the US seem to be held not with an intention of spending them in the US, but out of trust that everyone will always agree they're valuable.
USD has inherent value* because it can be exchanged for goods, property, and services in the US. Or to pay US taxes. The US has a lot of goods, property, and services that people want. US taxes are not a consideration for most people outside the US.
*Since most global trade is denominated in USD, and many countries use USD as their official currency, it can also be used to pay for goods, property, and services outside the US. But arguably it wouldn't have this global status if the US itself didn't have valuable goods, property, and services.
> If they do, it's just like a non-migrant worker.
It isn't quite. Imagine dollars leave the US, get sent to Nigeria, and eventually return to the US to buy some music.
Compare that to the case where the dollars do not get sent to Nigeria, but remain in the US.
In the latter case, the Nigerian person wanting their music needs to find another source for the dollars to buy their music. That in turn makes the dollar more valuable, and reduces Nigerias buying power for US products and services.
Imagine dollars leave the US, get sent to Nigeria, and eventually return to the US to buy some music.
I'm definitely on board with the idea that if those dollars never return to the US, then the US effectively got free labour (which is why a trade deficit, I often suggest, isn't automatically a bad thing - it's free stuff, at least until the dollars all come back!), which is quite a win for the US, and given that of all dollars sent overseas, some will never come back, the US has a steady supply of free labour purely because migrant workers are sending dollars overseas (which sure feels like a win for the US).
So the only "downside" for the US is if those dollars sent overseas do eventually make their way back and buy something; at that point the US is handing over goods and services in exchange for that original work done by the migrant worker. Not so much a downside as a delayed fair exchange.
Let me just think out loud for a moment; sending the US dollars to our Nigerian chum, and him returning them to the US in exchange for something, is the same (barring people skiming off the top and postage etc.) as our migrant worker just buying something and posting that to the Nigerian chum. So I think I agree with what you say, but I hypothesise it's not making the US any worse off than the money not making that round trip and just being spent on goods/services in the US by the migrant worker (barring postage etc).
NOT sending the US dollars to our Nigerian chum, and him needing to source US dollars from somewhere else, does make the US dollar a tiny bit more valuable as there is a tiny increased demand for it. Whether that's a good or bad thing for the US, I couldn't say, but if the US dollar becomes too expensive, US exports go down. At this point I guess we're heading into second-order effects of what happens when US exports become too expensive, and I wouldn't like to run into that right now.
It is one. The majority of migrants, qualified or not, have a hard time getting work permits. Finding work, low paid but paid, isn't the main challenge. Doesn't do any good if you aren't allowed to take that work so.
Also, our social systems are doing well. Thanks for worrying.
If you include pension systems, not so much. "Altersarmut" ("poverty of the old age") was not a widely used word in the 1990s, now it is a frequent topic in German media.
In many other European countries, old people live in their own properties with mortgages long paid off, so they aren't directly touched by rent increases. But Germans, for some reason, mostly like to live in rented flats and have a comparatively low home ownership rate, even in their old age. And the rents have grown quite a lot in big German cities. This means quite a squeeze for the elderly.
True. And we have Hartz IV, a national shame in my opinion. My point to OP was that, besides these facts, our social system is nowhere near to collapsing. No matter how many refugees we take in. That we as a nation, and that includes myself through our representative democracy, are ok with poor and old people being squeezed out of living space by rent seeking investors and treating people under Hartz IV as second class citizens is a different story. But we have elections in September, so there is a chance to shake things up a little bit.
Uh, anyone can make an asylum claim. An asylum claim is basically a plea to not be deported. It is usually a last ditch tactic when you are caught on US soil illegally, and you are not disputing that you are here illegally but are making a plea that you should not be returned anyway. It was a law introduced to aid Cuban boat refugees who were unable to apply for refugee visas and so always came here illegally.
The question is what are the grounds that would make such a plea legally successful, and being an economic refugee is not one of them. So while you are correct that economic refugees can make the claim, you are incorrect in that such a claim would succeed. People with red hair can also make the claim. Anyone can make the claim.
Which would become an one-way route, because once a nation has become a criminal-refugee paradise, why would third countries accept them travelling to their shores?
> Russia would assassinate people and the assassins would have safe travel home.
They already largely do. Also, in many countries that have experienced illiberal trends recently, they can still get you emigrated abroad and they still have power over you abroad.
As the journalist Sarah Kendzior says “This is a transnational crime syndicate masquerading as a government.”
To win something like this, it is better that large amounts of people who can stay be able to as long as feasibly possible. Once people leave en masse (sometimes there is no choice) the situation only gets uglier. But you do absolutely have to know when to leave.
You are missing the point that none of these happened without the criminal taking the risk that they would be caught before escaping the country where the crime occured.
The proposal is to make the law change so these are risk-free crimes. The law would not be a deterent to commiting crimes.
The fun thing about this proposal is when people say they want "countries to compete" they are often pushing for a market solution for the rich to get richer. But in this case it would hurt rich and poor alike. Jeff Bezos has little to gain from american law to be optional for americans and anyone to be able to murder him and opt out of the law by leaving the country.
> Holding China accountable would solve 70% of human rights abuses.
Do you mean that "70% of human rights abuses" in china or worldwide? And if worldwide, do you think the 70% of human rights absuses happen in china or that other nations will stop based on the fear of consequences?
Right now my first impression was that you claim that 70% of all human rights abuses happen in china, which, to me, seems like it is very very wrong. But that would be an uncharitable reading, so I'd be interested in if I get it wrong.
Always assume the more charitable interpretation. I think the person was just being hyperbolic, and used "70%" to mean "a lot". Pedantic squabbling over the exact number of something that is essentially unknowable is not particularly helpful to anyone except for the human rights abusers.
With that out of the way: I do think that if there were a mechanism in place that was sufficient to hold a huge state such as China accountable, it actually would have a significant impact on worldwide human rights abuses. If China was not able to get around this, what options would smaller tin-pot dictators have other than to reform?
Proving to the world that the rules apply regardless of relative size/importance has significant downstream effects beyond the single entity that is brought down for noncompliance with those rules. Likewise, the visible lack of required accountability for large players undermines faith in the system and encourages smaller players to see what they can get away with.
I'd love to see something like this as well, but it's not going to happen as long as so many people and/or their governments don't like large influxes of people.
> As others have said these sanctions will likely do more to harm the repressed citizens of the regime than Lukashenko
There are simply too many repressed citizens for them to all flee, so allowing some to flee might be just unfair, and also counterproductive because then you are left with only underpriviledged and repressed citizens.
They could still fly to Russia or Ukraine and then cross the land border into an EU country. Maybe Ukraine would follow suit though, they can benefit from better relations with the EU.
As others have said these sanctions will likely do more to harm the repressed citizens of the regime than Lukashenko
[1] https://www.bnt.eu/cs/zpravy/pravni-novinky/3137-belarus-int...