Laughter and applause are now subversive acts in Belarus...

A draft law published Friday prohibits the “joint mass presence of citizens in a public place that has been chosen beforehand, including an outdoor space, and at a scheduled time for the purpose of a form of action or inaction that has been planned beforehand and is a form of public expression of the public or political sentiments or protest”, wrote Ilya Mouzykantskii, of the NYT...
Hence in Belarus, Europe's last extant dictatorship, a pedestrian may be arrested by the authorities, for walking down the street, even if all he or she is doing is...walking down the street.
One's mere presence may be construed, at the authorities' discretion, as a form of public expression, which is illegal in Belarus...
Anyone rounded up is liable to be held up to fifteen days in administrative detention...
Since fundamental civil rights such as the right to protest are routinely denied in Belarus, and those brazen enough to insist on exercising such rights beaten, harassed and arrested, activists 
use Facebook and Twitter to invite opposition supporters to attend silent demonstrations.
Participants simply walk together, clap their hands in unison, or as Mouzykantskii indicated, have their cellphone alarms go off together...
President Alexander Lukashenko, reelected yet again after a rigged poll last December, considers these forms of expression to be subversive...(the protetsts that followed his last reelection were brutally repressed. Three opposition presidential candidates arrested in December are still in jail).
Last week, on the seventeenth anniversary of his rule, one such silent demonstration was organized...
After 17 years in power, Lukashenko has brought the country to a catastrophic situation, where people can't even clap their hands, one protester, Artur Stankevich told AP.
Some forty demonstrators were arrested, the security apparatus obviously keen to ensure that Minsk does not become another Cairo or Tunis...
Action and inaction, laughter and applause, coordinated cell phone ringings are now illegal in Belarus...
What will come next? 
Singing, walking one's dog, or maybe smoking a cigarette on a park bench...?
The sheer absurdity of such measures would be laughable, were those accused of such grievous offenses not routinely beaten and abused...
These brutal and inane forms of repression have no place in Europe in the twenty-first century...
The European Union should at the very least, tighten its sanctions against the Lukashenko regime, to ensure that we do not facilitate in any way the brutal repression taking place there... 
Hopefully, the brave Belarus people shall do the rest...
(the photograph of the arrest of a demonstrator in Belarus is by AFP)