5-15 October, the OSCE Human Dimension Conference 2026 is took place in Warsaw. On 13 October, on the sidelines of the Conference, the Belarusian Helsinki Committee organized a panel, “Rights in the Shadows: Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in the System of Political Repression in Belarus.”
The panel featured human rights defenders Ekaterina Deikalo (BHC), Taciana Niadbaj (PEN Belarus) and Maryia Zharylouskaya (Belarusian Congress of Democratic Trade Unions). The discussion was moderated by Anaïs Marin, former UN Special Rapporteur on Belarus.
The panel focused on violations of labor rights, cultural rights and the right to education within the Belarusian authorities’ repressive policy.
In particular, BHC expert Ekaterina Deikalo stressed that the state is moving toward a total monopolization of education, introducing measures of ideological and disciplinary control over both those who work with children and the children themselves. Over the past five years, private formal education has effectively been eliminated. A strict political filter is being imposed on teachers: “extremist crimes” have been added to the list of offenses whose conviction bars a person from working with children. The authorities are also taking control of individual educational activity: restrictions on self-employed persons in this field were introduced in 2025, and in 2026 the creation of a unified state register of private tutors working with minors was proposed. In effect, only those approved by the state will be able to do this work legally.
Children face discriminatory barriers to education and self-expression: representation at any international competition must be approved by the state, distance learning in foreign secondary schools is prohibited for children living in Belarus. Access to Belarusian-language secondary education has become more difficult since 2020. The rights of national minorities (primarily Polish and Lithuanian) in education are also being significantly violated: since 2023 it has been impossible to create schools in minority languages, only separate classes. People working in education in national minority languages face persecution.
The new history textbooks and the textbooks for the subject “Genocide of the Belarusian People” present the peaceful protests of 2020 as an attempted coup and draw a parallel between participants in the 2020 peaceful protests and collaboration with the Nazis during World War II, stigmatizing and discrediting national symbols, namely the “Pahonia” coat of arms and the white-red-white flag. Among other things, this may lead to hostility in one part of Belarusian society toward another.
Education is being significantly militarized. For example, starting in 2026, mandatory field training camps have been introduced for all tenth-graders.
Children are becoming increasingly vulnerable before the state and the school, and are starting to lose procedural guarantees. For example, the latest legislative change (June 2026) to the rules on searching minors: previously a search was possible only in the presence of a parent or legal representative, but now in school the presence of a teacher is sufficient, who is legally neither of those.
The human rights defenders called for all forms of repression to be taken into account in order to assess the human rights situation in Belarus validly, including the high degree of their latency. More on this can be found in the latest statement by the human rights coalition on assessing the situation with repression in Belarus.