Activists of “Boycott” campaign told about repressions during “election” to OSCE/ODIHR

About 100 cases of repressions against youth activists namely arrests, beatings, and expelling from educational institutions, have been recorded during the “Boycott” campaign.

Activists of the “Boycott” campaign met with representatives of the OSCE/ODIHR monitoring mission on September 24. The youth activists told to the observers about their view of the situation ahead of the “parliamentary election”, about the boycott campaign, repressions, used by the authorities against the campaign activists, agreed on further information sharing.

“It was a very interesting meeting. We told about the difficult conditions, in spite of founded on unknown grounds assurances of “liberalisation”, in which the youth organisation had to work in Belarus. We told that militia and secret services perform a real struggle against the campaign of boycotting the “election” in spite of assurances of the Central Election Commission. It is very important that our words weren’t unfounded, we gave recorded evidence of repressions against the youth and named the most demonstrative and blatant cases,” press secretary of the civil campaign “European Belarus” Alyaksandr Atroshchankau said.

According to the information of the human rights service of the civil campaign “European Belarus”, about 100 cases of repressions against the activists of the campaign have been registered during this campaign. Among them are detentions for spreading printed materials calling to boycott the “parliamentary election”, arbitrary administrative arrests, beating of detained activists, expelling from educational institutions.

Walter Siegl, a political analyst of the OSCE/ODIHR mission, thanked the activists for the information and assured it would be taken into consideration when making conclusions about the “election campaign”.