Office of Public Prosecutor for Belarus urges Greece to deny entry to Belarusian sports minister :: Charter'97 :: News

The German-based Office of the Public Prosecutor for Belarus has urged the Greek government to deny entry to Belarusian Sports Minister Yury Sivakov, who intends to lead the country’s delegation to the upcoming Olympic Games. Mr. Sivakov is on the list of officials suspected of complicity in the alleged abduction of four prominent opposition figures in Belarus, Lyudmila Karpenko, head of the Office and the widow of opposition politician Gennady Karpenko, said in an appeal to the Greek embassy in Minsk.

Politicians Yury Zakharenko and Vladimir Gonchar, businessman Anatoly Krasovsky and journalist Dmitry Zavadsky all went missing in 1999-2000, during Mr. Sivakov’s tenure as the country’s minister of internal affairs.

This past April, the Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly (PACE) adopted a resolution that invited the judicial authorities of the countries whose laws foresee the international jurisdiction of their national courts for cases of serious human rights abuses - Spain for instance - to institute proceedings against certain high-ranking Belarusian officials for the alleged murder, for political reasons, of one or more of the four disappeared persons.
The resolution was based on a report by Cypriot MP Christos Pourgourides, rapporteur on Belarus, who expressed certainty that Mr. Sivakov and current Interior Minister Vladimir Naumov would be arrested if they visited any of such countries.

According to Mrs. Karpenko, the Office has brought criminal charges against Mr. Sivakov and is preparing to press him for written testimony.

The Office was established by Belarusian opposition figures in Germany’s Esslingen in July to examine Belarus` electoral regulations and the legal aspects of the 1996 referendum that gave Aleksandr Lukashenko sweeping powers, and probe the disappearances of his opponents.