A new Law on State Registration and Liquidation (Termination of Activities) of Economic Entities , adopted on 1st June 2026, introduced a significant change according to which private institutions (establishments) and associations (unions of legal entities) that want to register will face a new national-security screening before receiving decision on state registration. This brings these forms of CSOs deeper into Belarus' existing restrictive registration regime for public associations, foundations, trade unions and political parties.
After the new law comes in force on 1 July 2027, a registering authority will have to request information from the state body responsible for preventing and identifying threats to national security before registering a private institution or an association, or registering a change of the owner of a private institution. If that body reports that the activity of the institution's owner or an association member creates a threat to national security, the registering authority must refuse registration - no further discretion is given to the civil registrar.
The mechanism is set out in Articles 25 and 26 of the new law. The law does not name the Committee for State Security (KGB) directly in these provisions. However, the Law on State Security Bodies assigns state security bodies responsibility for assessing national security and developing measures to prevent and identify threats to national security. This makes the KGB and his regional branches the apparent state security body behind the new screening mechanism.
From a general registration procedure to security screening
This change is particularly important because private institutions and associations have historically benefited from the general registration regime for legal entities, rather than the more restrictive procedures applicable to specific types of civil society entities. Belarus has separate legislation governing organisations such as public associations, foundations, political parties and trade unions, while the registration of private institutions and many associations has been governed by the general notification-based framework for registering business entities. That gap functioned as one of the few remaining routes for Belarusian civil society to obtain legal personality without direct security-service scrutiny. Many private institutions in particular have been a popular form for research, educational and charitable initiatives over roughly the past two decades.
The new law largely preserves previous structure and keeps institutions and associations in the frame with business entities, but introduces a new special security-based filter for these two forms. Once it takes effect, founders of institutions and associations will face a check functionally equivalent to the vetting already applied to more tightly regulated civic forms.
The change is also significant in the context in which the law was adopted. This new Law replaces the presidential Decree № 1 of 16 January 2009, which has governed registration and liquidation since 2009. The new Law was adopted on 1 June 2026 and will replace the decree's registration framework from 1 July 2027.
The law was in the works for over 7 years. In fact, this legislative update is not a true reform, but rather a technicality in line with replacing all decrees by laws due to the 2022 amendments to the Constitution, which removed the "decree" as a special type of legal act issued by the president alone from legislation.
Importantly, the national-security screening was not included in the version of the draft law submitted for public consultation in 2019. More than 30 comments were reportedly submitted during that consultation (including from CSOs and human rights experts), but organisations and other stakeholders therefore had no opportunity to comment specifically on this new restrictive and discriminative check-mechanism before its adoption. This provision was included in the draft bill submitted by the government to parliament in 2025, which has not since been resubmitted for public consultation.
Broad grounds, limited procedural safeguards
The main concern is not simply that a security body will be involved in CSOs registration. The problem is the breadth and lack of transparency of the test. Article 26 does not define what constitutes a "threat to national security" for the purposes of registration, nor does it establish criteria that the relevant state body must apply when making this assessment. The law consequently gives a potentially decisive role to a security assessment without explaining what conduct or circumstances can trigger a negative conclusion.
There is a procedural safeguard in that the relevant state body must provide its information within five working days of receiving the registering authority's request. However, the law does not specify what happens if no response is received within that period. It also gives the registering authority up to three working days after receiving the response to complete the registration. This creates a procedure that can delay registration and leaves an important question unanswered: whether the absence of a negative response within five working days automatically allows registration to proceed. These details may be addressed in implementing regulations, but they are not settled by the law itself.
Formally, Article 27 of the Law provides for the possibility that the non-registration of entities by the registering authority may be appealed to the economic court by interested parties, including persons whose rights and/or legitimate interests have been infringed as a result of the failure to register such entities, within one year of the date on which registration was not carried out. This provision applies to all cases where registration is not granted, and not only where this is the result of a KGB check on the founder (for example, where the reason was the filing of an incomplete documentation package). The current state of the Belarusian judicial system gives very little reason to believe that such a new appeals procedure would be an effective mechanism for restoring rights.
The impact could be particularly significant because the screening concerns the founders or members behind the organisation, rather than merely the documents submitted for registration.
A private institution may be established by a single individual or by an organisation, including potentially a foreign organisation. An association brings together legal entities or individual entrepreneurs, meaning that the new mechanism can potentially extend the security assessment to the organisations participating in its creation. This changes the practical meaning of registration from checking whether the applicant has submitted the required documents to assessing whether the people or organisations behind the proposed entity are acceptable from a national-security perspective.
At the same time, no such check is required for commercial organisations, including companies established by foreign founders or overseas investors.
What does this mean for civil society?
The new mechanism is likely to make private institutions and associations considerably less attractive as vehicles for independent civic initiatives. In practice, these organisational forms will move closer to public associations, foundations, political parties and trade unions, for which Belarus already applies significantly more restrictive registration arrangements. The change may therefore further narrow the space for civil society organisations to choose the legal form most appropriate for their activities.
It may also create incentives for organisations to adapt their legal form further to implement their activities in forms that are not the most suitable, but are accessible for registration without excessive political scrutiny. Some initiatives could look to forms that remain outside the new screening mechanism, such as consumer cooperatives or gardening partnerships, where these forms are genuinely compatible with their activities. Others may consider establishing commercial organisations and presenting their activities as social entrepreneurship. Such developments would not necessarily reflect a genuine change in the nature of the initiatives; rather, they could be a response to the increasing difficulty of operating through a non-profit legal form.
Alongside this fundamental introduction of political control, the new law provides for many other technical innovations that are important for the day-to-day operations of legal entities and their registration, including CSOs (for example, an official e-mail address of organisations).
What happens next?
The new Law will enter into its main phase of application on 1 July 2027, giving authorities time to adopt implementing rules and clarify the practical operation of the new registration procedure. The most important issues to watch will be how "threat to national security" is interpreted, what information is used in the screening process, and what happens when the security body does not provide a response within the statutory five-working-day period. It remains highly likely that these important issues will remain unresolved, which will create broad opportunities for arbitrary refusals to grant registration.
For civil society, the new mechanism is an important shift even before it is implemented: it turns registration of two previously more accessible forms of non-profit organisation into a process involving state-security assessment of their founders or members. This may significantly affect the ability of civic initiatives to establish legal entities and choose an organisational form suited to their activities.