NUCLEAR POWER IN BELARUS AND WORLDWIDE
MINSK, 14 April (BelTA) – The development of the court system in Belarus has allowed making the administration of justice humane. Belarus President Aleksandr Lukashenko made the statement during the ceremony held in the Palace of Independence on 14 April to bestow government awards upon Supreme Court judges, BelTA has learned.
Aleksandr Lukashenko remarked that nothing had been broken in the course of improvement of Belarus' court system, it had been the main principle. “We remember that we stand on the shoulders of giants. And the legacy we've inherited from the Soviet justice system, what we invented and gained in the first few years of our sovereignty and independence we very calmly improved in the course of reforming our court system. It is not my accomplishment. It is first and foremost yours. You've always come forward with various innovations to the president and I've never turned them down. And in this manner we've gone through three stages of reformation of our system,” he said.
“Despite our ‘dictatorship' only 24,000 prisoners are left at present, down from 52,000 or 54,000 at the beginning of my presidency. That's all the dictatorship for you – the number of prisoners was halved in the period you and I have gone through. It means that without excessive humanization, as it is customary for you to say, we have made our country humane and our justice system humane,” the Belarusian leader stated.
The president also remarked that in the course of reformation of the court system innovations had been initially introduced and tested as statutory and regulatory enactments. Once it was clear that the introduced innovations were positive, decisions were made to go ahead with “radical reformation of not even the court system but the government system in Belarus,” he remarked. The relevant amendments were introduced into the Constitution.
Aleksandr Lukashenko stressed: “Today the president doesn't have the authority he had before the Constitution was amended. You will be elected by representatives of the nation during the Belarusian People's Congress. And it is a very serious step. Am I worried about that? Yes, it is worrying a bit because the judicial branch of the government is important. But I am sure we can handle it. We are not the people we were 20-25 years ago. We will manage to do it.”
