Belarusian non-governmental human rights organisation. Telegram: https://nitter.gq/t.co/CEKZ2AgI7u
Belarus, Lithuania, Poland
Joined May 2010
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35 Years Since the August Coup: The Road to Belarusian Independence - ndbelarus.com/?p=6737
From Minsk to Vilnius: Transnational Repression, the Case of Maksim - ndbelarus.com/?p=6724
Migrants Behind Closed Doors in Pabradė: Collective Punishment and Food Cooked in Tin Cans - ndbelarus.com/?p=6695
Our House Launches Morning Paranoia in Partnership with ElevenLabs - ndbelarus.com/?p=6680
16 July — the date of Sergey Shpak’s detention
On 16 July 2021, Prisoner for Peace Sergey Shpak was detained.
He was punished for speaking out against violence and for refusing to support repression.
Today the best way to support Sergey is to remind him that he is not alone.
✉️ Write to him:
Prison No. 4
99A Kropotkina St.
Mogilev 212011
BELARUS
To: Sergey Shpak
#NashDom #PrisonersForPeace #Belarus #NoWar
Olga Karach has been labeled an «extremist» 29 times — a record in Lukashenko’s campaign against Belarusian civil society. - ndbelarus.com/?p=6632
How can discrimination emerge even where the law formally guarantees equality?
Our new Policy Brief examines how political rhetoric, administrative practice, restrictive measures and insufficient oversight can gradually combine to create structural and intersectional discrimination.
Using Lithuania as a case study, we explore how these processes affect refugees, political exiles, human rights defenders and civil society organisations.
The Policy Brief puts forward concrete recommendations to the European Parliament, the European Commission and EU Member States to:
🔹 strengthen protection against structural and administrative discrimination;
🔹 ensure effective equality safeguards in asylum and migration procedures;
🔹 protect human rights organisations from transnational repression and administrative pressure;
🔹 establish an independent European mechanism to monitor structural discrimination, transnational repression and administrative accountability.
The document was prepared for the European Parliament’s LIBE Committee hearing on the revival of the Horizontal Equal Treatment Directive—one of the EU’s key initiatives to strengthen equality protection across Europe.
📄 The link to the full Policy Brief is available in the comments.
Closing Equality Gaps: Lessons from Lithuania for Reviving the Horizontal Equal Treatment Directive - ndbelarus.com/?p=6612
Our House in Numbers: One Week, 1.23 Million Views, Nearly 25,000 Interactions - ndbelarus.com/?p=6587
13 July — the date of Dmitry Gulin’s detention
On 13 July 2023, Prisoner for Peace Dmitry Gulin was detained.
He was punished for criticising violence and refusing to stay silent about repression.
Today the best way to support Dmitry is to remind him that he is not alone.
✉️ Write to him:
IK No. 3
211322, Vitebskaya oblast,
p. Vitsba
Dmitryu Gulinu
#NashDom #PrisonersForPeace #Belarus #NoWar
Vilnius Begins to See the Neris as a River, Not a Military Asset - ndbelarus.com/?p=6562
To Refuse to Kill Is Threatening to Every State — An Article in Ställ om! Magazine - ndbelarus.com/?p=6489
The War in Ukraine and the Crisis of Masculinity: Impacts on Society and the Path to Peacebuilding - ndbelarus.com/?p=6556
The Pool at the Our House Children Summer Camp — or: How to Conduct Peace Negotiations with Bees
Last year, the Wittlich IGFM Working Group gave Our House a large swimming pool for its summer camp for refugee children. We are still enormously grateful for this wonderful gift. The children certainly are. The bees, however, seem to have mixed feelings.
A swimming pool is a surprisingly serious problem for bees.
The reason is scientific. Bees do not have an artificial horizon like pilots. They simply fly towards whatever looks brightest. Our crystal-clear pool—lovingly maintained every evening by the Our House team and its trusted colleague, chlorine—looks to a bee like a giant mirror. Add the bright blue-and-white tiles, and what looks wonderfully summery to us becomes a dangerous optical illusion. Predictably, bees lose their bearings and crash-land into the pool.
Adults usually remain calm. The children, however, leap out of the water with the elegance of startled penguins and enough noise to alert every nearby beehive.
So yesterday Our House decided it was time to begin peace negotiations with the bees.
Our House has twice been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Another Nobel Prize was awarded to the scientists who deciphered the language of bees. If bees have a language, diplomacy should be possible.
Unfortunately, we had underestimated bee foreign policy.
Bees do not speak. They dance. A bee returns to the hive, performs a few circles or a figure-eight, and every colleague knows where to fly next.
Perhaps more of our own meetings should be conducted through dance—it might prevent quite a few conflicts.
Having studied the basics of bee choreography, the Our House team now possesses a scientifically respectable way of telling persistent bores where they should go: by running in circles, tracing figure-eights and occasionally splashing them with water.
Sadly, our negotiations reached one obstacle. No matter how well you dance, a bee never imagines you are dancing for her.
So we decided to rely on bee intelligence instead.
Every hive has specialist water carriers who fetch water and cool the hive with their wings. When there are not enough specialists, management apparently sends ordinary worker bees instead—bees who understand water logistics about as well as we understand classical ballet. Those are the ones that end up in our pool.
As if that were not enough, bees also mistake the smell of chlorine for an attractive mineral source, so their scientific curiosity frequently ends in an emergency water landing.
Fortunately, the solution is simple. Put flat stones into a shallow bowl with a little water, rescue the little aviators from the pool and place them on the stones—rather like Copenhagen's Little Mermaid.
They will do the rest. By the next dance, the entire hive will know where the new watering place is. After all, even an ordinary worker bee can dance a perfectly respectable waltz.
Our experiment continues.
For now, we are simply looking for a larger bowl.
Transnational Repression Against Belarusians — An Article in Ställ om! Magazine - ndbelarus.com/?p=6475
