Unsafe airspace for Roman Protasevich

Belarusian police detain journalist Roman Protasevich during an opposition protest in Minsk in 2017.Sergei Grits / AP

What happened to the Belarusian Roman Protasevich last week seems like a horror story. The journalist had not set foot in his country since 2019 because he was on the black list of persecuted dissidents. He has ended up in jail for taking a Ryanair flight, a European company, between two community capitals, Athens and Vilnius. How was he to know that KGB agents were traveling on his plane and that the Lukashenko dictatorship would force the landing with a false bomb warning. When they were flying over Belarus, Minsk activated its hunt by making use of its sovereignty over the airspace. Before being taken away by the police, Protasevich assured that the death penalty awaited him. Think about it: a plane with 120 international passengers hijacked mid-flight by a dictatorship. What will happen the next time a Turkish activist,Russian or Chinese fly over the country that is pursuing you? Could this happen on a Tokyo-London flight? It is not the first time that a government has taken control of a civilian flight, although there are few precedents. In 1956, for example, France diverted a Moroccan plane to arrest five historical leaders of the Algerian National Liberation Front.

In the coming weeks, various international organizations will investigate what exactly happened. It appears that Belarus violated the Chicago Convention, which prohibits putting passengers on a civilian flight at risk, and the Montreal Convention, because it was knowingly alerted to a bomb that did not exist. The problem is that those same norms are those that grant each State the power over its airspace. Furthermore, non-interference has always been defended tooth and nail by countries that repress political opposition, such as Russia or China. Given this, what the international community can do is little. Brussels has added more sanctions to Belarus. This incident pits her against Russia because Putin is the great supporter of Lukashenko, her buffer dictator. The EU also has to keep pushing, shaming,lobbying through multilateral institutions to generate international standards. There must be conflicts so that respect for human rights is expanded in the airspace.

For the American NGO Freedom House, we are facing a case of transnational repression, like when Saudi Arabia commissioned the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul in 2018. Like that one, this is a sad story in which only a repressive government wins. The worst offender is the reporter Protasevich. If he survives, he will serve many years in prison. The Belarusians lose, who have endured a brutal regime since 1994 and will now be even more isolated by economic sanctions, with less mobility and fewer options. Airlines lose business. We all lose because, as long as another right of airspace is not generated over some parts of the sky, the satraps are in command.