Lawyer Alyaksandr Halieu: “Testimony of some witnesses remind of words of rural propagandists”

Lawyers have made statements in the court of Tsentralny district of Minsk, where the trial over participants of the protest rally of market vendors is taking place. Lawyers Alyaksandr Halieu, Svyatlana Harbatok and Tamara Sidarenka have made statements.

Alyaksandr Halieu has stated that testimony of some witnesses looked more like words of rural propagandists who had been reading took much of “Sovetskaya Byelorussia”. He said that video materials were unconvincing, as they were representing a “number of edited clips”. As said by the lawyer, the aim of such harsh verdicts is to intimidate, so that young people would not stand out from the rank and file, gray mass, from those who are conformists. The lawyer has also stated that a judgment of conviction in this case would once again place Belarus behind its neighbours in development. However, as said figuratively by Halieu, “the white will always win the gray”, “Nasha Niva” informs.

The lawyer asked the court to acquit his clients. Andrei Kim’s lawyer Tamara Sidarenka has also stated that the case looks like an orchestrated case, beginning from the choice of defendants and finish by the refusal to allow family and friends of the defendants enter the court room. She attracted attention that Kim had been already punished for participation in an unsanctioned rally, and she saw no grounds for punishing him again for the same action.

Lawyer Svyatlana Harbatok in her speech noted that witnesses-policemen spoke in general, and not about actions of concrete persons: “Significance of their testimony is close to zero, as long as they had been speaking about a crowd, and nobody spoke about the group that was standing in the beginning o the column. Nobody from witnesses had recognized Straltsou, while Kojpish was recognized by one person only… It is unknown which events were meant by a deputy head of traffic police Padbyarozkin, a person with rich fantasy, but his words cannot become a ground for a verdict”. She has also stated that video recording demonstrated in the court had been made with violation of rules for collection of evidence. Recording by the KGB hadn’t been registered in a due manner, individual signs are absent at footage.