Iryna Khalip

The banned march was intended to be part of the opposition festivities commemorating the 1918 founding of the Belarusian Democratic Republic.

She was forced into a police vehicle and detained at an Interior Ministry facility in Minsk, along with 34 other journalists.

She was released later that day.

Iryna Uladzimirawna Khalip (Iрына Уладзіміраўна Халiп, Ирина Владимировна Халип; born November 12, 1967) is a Belarusian journalist, reporter and editor in the Minsk bureau of Novaya Gazeta, known for her criticism of Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko.

For her journalistic activities she has been regularly harassed, detained, and beaten by the Belarusian KGB and authorities.

Iryna Khalip was born on November 12, 1967, in Minsk, a city in Belorussian SSR.

Her father is an arts and theater critic.

She graduated from Belarus State University with a focus in journalism studies in 1989.

Afterward graduation Khalip got a job at the government paper Sovetskaya Belorussiya.

Belarus, which had gained independence from the USSR after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, elected Alexander Lukashenko as president in 1994.

He quickly became known for restricting freedom of speech and freedom of the press.

Khalip has stated "Dictatorships don’t like journalists - they either destroy them or buy them out."

That year, Lukashenko fired the editor of Soviet Belarusia after the employees proposed privatizing the paper, and also demanded the paper become his "mouthpiece."

Khalip quit her job and became a correspondent with other papers.

She decided she wanted to become a full-time journalist in 1994, at age 26.

She has stated "I was looking for something not very difficult...something easy and interesting. I was only half right, because journalism is really interesting, but not easy."

In 1997, Khalip was reporting at a rally that opposed Belarus unifying with Russia.

She was clubbed by riot police and dragged by her hair, and her father, who was with her at the rally, was beaten into unconsciousness.

Khalip later went to work for the independent newspaper Imya ("Name").

In 1999, the Belarusian government issued a warning to Imya over an article Khalip had written about the Central Electoral Committee's activities.

According to the chair of the Belarusian Press Committee, the article and the newspaper's coverage of the upcoming presidential elections amounted to "incitement to overthrow the state," and a second warning would lead to the paper's closure.

That year, police came to Khalip's home and detained her for an entire day.

They interrogated and allegedly threatened her, and while she was detained, they searched her apartment, confiscated travel documents, and took her work computer.

In March 2000, Khalip was reporting on a Minsk demonstration protesting an official ban on a public march.

Anna Politkovskaya, one of their well-known reporters and a winner of the 2002 Courage in Journalism Award, was shot to death outside her flat in 2006.

Three years before that, the Gazeta investigative journalist Yuri Shchekochikhin died in highly suspicious circumstances; many factions believe he was poisoned by the KGB.

Khalip, however, has stated she won't stop reporting on civil and human rights abuses, because “[It would] betray my friends.

[It would] betray the memory of their husbands.

In 2003, President Lukashenko altered the Belarusian criminal code to make it illegal for journalists to write anything negative about the president.

At that point, Khalip had written multiple articles on corruption in the prosecutor's office for Belorusskaya Delovaya Gazeta (Belarusian Business Newspaper).

The newspaper was accordingly forced to suspend its activities for "insulting the honor and dignity of the president."

TIME selected her for the 2005 special issue "European Heroes", category "Brave Hearts".

She is married to former Belarus presidential candidate Andrei Sannikov, an opposition activist and recipient of the 2005 Bruno Kreisky Award.

In 2006, the newspaper was forced to close permanently.

After the closure of the Belorusskaya Delovaya Gazeta Khalip became a regular editor and reporter for the Minsk bureau of Novaya Gazeta (New Gazette), a newspaper based in Moscow.

The paper is famous for being the very last independent newspaper in Russia.

There are no independent newspapers in Belarus, making it one of the few outlets for independent Belarusian journalists.

The paper is known for being outspoken about the corruption of governments in the former Soviet Republics, and its journalists have faced brutal intimidation and persecution.

In 2009 she was awarded the Courage in Journalism Award from the International Women's Media Foundation.

In May 2011, she was given a two-year suspended prison sentence for her role in protests following the 2010 Belarus election.