2023-04-22 13:46:00
The chief prosecutor would sentence Raman Pratasevich, the Belarusian journalist who was detained by Alexander Lukashenko in 2021 following forcing a Ryanair flight between Athens and Vilnius to land in Minsk, to 10 years in prison, Medúza reports.
Pratašević, who was a journalist for NEXTA, one of the largest anti-government media outlets, was charged with a total of 1,500 crimes together with his colleagues – the paper’s co-founder, Stefan Putilo, and Jan Rudik, the other former editor of the medium, which operates mostly on Telegram: among other things, , that they organized demonstrations and riots, and they were also accused of using their media, which was considered radical, to seize power.
In a country that cannot really be called free and democratic, it is considered a crime if people organize demonstrations outside the campaign period – according to the accusation, by reporting on the demonstrations, NEXTA themselves became instigators.
MOREOVER, PRATASEVIC – WHO LIVED IN POLAND WITH POLITICAL ASYLUM PRIOR TO HIS ILLEGAL ARREST – IS CONSIDERED A TERRORIST BY THE STATE OF BELARUS.
The trial began on February 16th, but on April 13th, Prataszevics was also accused of committing much more serious crimes, to which Prataszevics partially pleaded guilty. According to the Prosecutor General, the Prataseviches damaged the Belarusian state in the amount of 30 million rubles, which the journalist only partially acknowledged.
The chief prosecutor asked for a longer sentence for his companions, but at the same time, of the three defendants, only Pratasevic is in Belarus,
thus, he is probably the only one of the accused who will actually go to prison.
Pratasevich was detained together with his girlfriend at the time, the Russian national Sofija Szapega, back in May 2021, when the Belarusian state forced a flight between Athens and Vilnius to land for some reason. Szapega, who did not earn her living as a journalist, was previously sentenced to six years in prison, which she is currently serving in Gomel prison, but her parents have long wanted their daughter to serve her sentence in Russia.
By the way, Prataszevics is not the first and only person to be detained following the 2020 presidential election.
The former ally of Sviatlana Tsyhanouszka, the opposition challenger of Alexander Lukashenko, also known as the last dictator of Europe, Maria Kalesnykava, was sentenced to twelve years in 2021 for similar charges. detained and then sentenced to 18 years in prison in December 2021 – Tsyhanouszkaja ran in the election in the first place only because her husband was not allowed to run due to his detention.
According to the human rights organization Vyashna, 1,500 people are currently being held in Belarus for political reasons – including some representatives of the organization.
(Cover photo: Raman Prataszevics on August 31, 2020. Photo: Michal Fludra / NurPhoto / Getty Images)
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