Lawyer denied access to Sannikov again

Treatment of political prisoner becomes more and more cruel.

Andrei Varvashkevich, a lawyer of presidential candidate Andrei Sannikov, visited penal colony Vitsba-3 today, but was denied a meeting with his client. The lawyer was told the reason was an inquiry over Sannikov’s alleged complaint about threat to his life in prison.

Relatives of the political prisoner regard this ground as far-fetched. Neither lawyer nor Sannikov’s relatives have had access to him for over two months.

“Taking into consideration Andrei’s isolation and today’s sentence to Mikalai Statkevich, we can say treatment of political prisoners is becoming more cruel, pressure on them is increasing. The authorities are using a tactics of complete isolation of political prisoners. They probably did not expect that these people would break in prisons, but become moral leaders for everyone,” Sannikov’s wife Iryna Khalip told in an interview to charter97.org.