A Belarus court on Monday sentenced exiled opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya to 15 years in prison after a trial in absentia on charges including conspiring to overthrow the government, the latest move in a months-long effort by the Belarusian government. to suppress dissent.
Tsikhanouskaya ran against authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko in August 2020, in an election that gave him his sixth term and was widely viewed as rigged. She called her conviction and sentence a act of revenge by the Belarusian authorities and vowed to continue “fighting for freedom”.
The results of the vote sparked the largest protests in the country’s history. Lukashenko unleashed a brutal crackdown on protesters, accusing the opposition of plotting to overthrow the government, and Tsikhnouskaya left for Lithuania under pressure.
Other key politicians and activists were arrested or pressured to leave the country.
Tsikhanouskaya and four other opposition figures were tried in absentia in the Belarusian capital, Minsk. Photos of the courtroom, published by Belarus’ state news agency Belta, showed an empty cage for the defendants. The charges against him also included creating and leading an extremist group, inciting hatred, and harming national security.
Tsikhanouskaya told the Associated Press in an interview that her public defender has not contacted her once during the trial and has not responded to her requests to review the case files.
He denounced that the law and the justice system in Belarus no longer work and that the state “has turned into a big KGB”.
“The regime takes revenge on me and all Belarusians, it takes revenge for the fact that we choose freedom in 2020, for not giving up, not giving in, but for continuing to fight,” Tsikhanouskaya said.
“If Lukashenko could, he would have jailed everyone,” he added.
In addition to the prison sentence, Tsikhnaouskaya was ordered to pay a fine of about $11,000. Another exiled opposition politician, Pavel Latushka, was sentenced to 18 years in prison. Latushka, who was once Belarus’s culture minister and later ambassador to several European nations, was also banned for five years from holding public office.
Maryya Maroz, Volha Kavalkova and Siarhei Dylevski received 12-year sentences.
They all left Belarus after protests broke out in August 2020. The demonstrations were the largest and most sustained since Lukashenko took office in 1994. Since then, he has ruled the country with an iron fist. His government unleashed a brutal crackdown on protesters, arresting more than 35,000 and beating thousands.
The country’s most prominent human rights defender and Nobel Peace Prize 2022, Ales Bialiatski, was among those arrested. Was sentenced to 10 years in prison last week .
Tsikhanouskaya ran against Lukashenko instead of her husband, the popular opposition politician Siarhei Tsikhanouskiwho was arrested in the middle of his campaign in 2020 and sentenced to 18 years in prison.
Last month, a Belarusian court added an additional 18 months to Tsikhanouski’s sentence for alleged violations of prison rules.
Tsikhanouski maintained his innocence during the trial, which was held behind closed doors, according to the Viasna Human Rights Center, Belarus’s most prominent human rights group. For two months, the politician was held “in inhumane conditions” in an isolation cell, the group said.
Viasna has recorded a total of 1,456 political prisoners in Belarus.
Tsikhanouskaya said that the repression in Belarus is intensifying, and every day between 15 and 20 people in the country are jailed, which “shows how little confidence the regime has in itself.”
“If Lukashenko thinks that this imprisonment regime will stop me, stop the Belarusians, he is wrong: we will continue to fight for freedom more actively,” he said.
(with information from AP)
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Source-www.infobae.com