The Viasna Human Rights Center tells why law enforcement agencies prosecute Belarusians returning home from abroad, what kinds of sentences the detainees receive, and what conditions people who’d like to return to Belarus need to meet. According to Viasna,...
Security forces detained at least 44 scientists during a “raid” on the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in early November. Criminal cases were launched against some of them. Now all the detainees are being laid off from the Academy. Among the detainees are Aleh...
Political prisoner Mikalai Autukhovich was sentenced to 25 years in a high-security penal colony. He will serve the first five years in a maximum-security prison. This is an unprecedentedly harsh sentence in a politically motivated case in Belarus. Along...
The Viasna Human Rights Center reports that in August 2022 at least 98 people, out of whom 19 were women, were convicted in political cases. More than half of the sentences were handed down on charges of defamation, which are typically brought up against those...
Vital Kuznechyk and his son Uladzislau, who had been hiding from persecution in the Swedish embassy in Minsk for more than a year and a half, managed to escape from Belarus to Latvia. At one of the 2020 protest marches in Vitsebsk, Uladzislau tried to save...
Since 2020, the authorities have been spreading fear in Belarus. Arrests, trials, and long sentences for any opponents of the current regime have become horrible routine. But the already dire situation has become even worse, with Belarus...
