Human Rights Activists Present Chronicles of Human Rights Violations In Belarus :: Charter'97 :: News

The presentation of the report – chronicles of human rights violations in Belarus in 2004 was held on June 7 in Minsk by human rights center “Viasna”. The book of 375 pages was published in Russian, Belarusian and English. It contains facts of human rights violations in chronological order.

As the leader of the human rights center “Viasna” Ales Bialatski, it is the seventh edition of this kind. This time human rights watchdogs have decided to deviate from the traditional model of such reports in Western countries, where the facts of human rights violations are grouped into parts according to the topic. As said by Bialatski, this form seems more successful for him. “In the book we see the pulse of life of our society, daily struggle for human rights, dynamics, outline of every day and a week. It is obvious in this book that the stillness observed in Minsk streets, is deceptive. Behind it unseen, but active socio-political life is going on”.

According to the lawyer of the “Viasna” Valyantsin Stefanovich, the situation with human rights in Belarus has “obviously deteriorated” over the recent years. “Earlier such reports were not so long. Now there are eight political prisoners in Belarus. If earlier the authorities were masking the politically motivated trials by some smokescreen, as it was during the first trial over Andrei Klimov and Vladimir Kudinov, no such smokescreen is even searched for now. The authorities are imprisoning those whom they want to imprison without any façade of lawfulness,” Stefanovich believes.