Belarusian Helsinki Committee decries conviction of Statkevich, Severinets :: Charter'97 :: News

The Belarusian Helsinki Committee (BHC) has condemned harsh sentences handed down to prominent opposition figures Nikolai Statkevich and Pavel Severinets on May 31. The politicians were sentenced to three years of “restricted freedom” for staging a series of demonstrations against the official results of last October’s parliamentary elections and national referendum marred by massive fraud allegations. They will have their terms shortened by a year under the amnesty law that took effect earlier this month.

“In the October of 2004, OMON riot policemen brutally broke up a peaceful protest against the falsification of the parliamentary elections and the referendum on lifting constitutional restrictions on the presidency for Aleksandr Lukashenko,” the human rights organization says in its Tuesday statement. “The police battered several hundreds people, including reporters. The protesters were slapped with excessively high fines and received jail sentences of up to 15 days.”
The BHC has called on the nation’s law enforcement agencies to find and punish those guilty of cracking down on the peaceful rally and take steps to overturn the conviction of Messrs. Statkevich and Severinets.

Several other prominent opposition figures in Belarus face criminal charges regarded by the domestic opposition and human rights groups as politically motivated.

Former MP Andrei Klimov will stand trial on June 6 on charges of organizing an unauthorized protest in Minsk on March 25. Mr. Klimov, who has been held in custody since April 22, is also accused of insulting Aleksandr Lukashenko, in a trial that opened in early April but was later adjourned indefinitely.

On May 23, prosecutors formally charged former dissident lawmaker Sergei Skrebets, who was arrested on May 15, with attempting to offer a bribe.

Moreover, prosecutors in Minsk reopened a slander case against Garri Pogonyailo, deputy head of the BHC, on charges of insulting Mr. Lukashenko during an interview with Sweden`s TV 4 channel last year.