Western governments and human rights campaigners say that opposition is stifled in Belarus, and a free media is virtually non-existent. The invitation came from Karel Schwarzenberg, the foreign minister of the Czech Republic, which holds the rotating EU presidency.<\/p>\n
The Czech president Vaclav Klaus said he was \u201csurprised\u201d by the move, adding that he would not shake Lukashenko\u2019s hand, nor invite him to the presidential palace.<\/p>\n
See video<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The man America called \u201cthe last dictator in Europe\u201d \u2013 the President of Belarus \u2013 has been invited to a European Union summit on partnership with ex-Soviet states in Prague. Alexander Lukashenko has long been shunned in the west, and until last year was the subject of an EU travel ban.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":215706,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[17],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/europeanbelarus.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200492"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/europeanbelarus.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/europeanbelarus.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/europeanbelarus.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/europeanbelarus.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=200492"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/europeanbelarus.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200492\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/europeanbelarus.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/215706"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/europeanbelarus.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=200492"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/europeanbelarus.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=200492"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/europeanbelarus.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=200492"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}