Barysau photographer Aliaksandr Ziankou sentenced to 3 years in prison

Ziank­ou, a pho­tog­ra­ph­er, was detained on 22 June 2023, at his home in Barysau. The law enforcers searched the house and seized com­put­er equip­ment. Ziank­ou was then tak­en to Min­sk and held for 10 days in a tem­po­rary deten­tion facil­i­ty.

Accord­ing to a for­mer cell­mate of Ali­ak­san­dr Ziank­ou, there were between 8 and 10 peo­ple in a dou­ble cell. He does not remem­ber any vis­i­ble signs of phys­i­cal abuse, such as bruis­es or scratch­es. Ali­ak­san­dr remained calm and refused to con­fess. The police tried to force him to give them his smart­phone pass­word, but Ali­ak­san­dr refused. He also refused the ser­vices of a pub­lic attor­ney.

On the fifth or sixth day, he was tak­en for ques­tion­ing by an inves­ti­ga­tor and returned five hours lat­er. Upon his return, he revealed that he had been charged with pro­mot­ing extrem­ist activ­i­ties. The charge was relat­ed to his videos pub­lished on the web­site of the Bel­sat TV chan­nel, which had been declared “extrem­ist for­ma­tion” by the Belaru­sian author­i­ties. The evi­dence was alleged­ly found in equip­ment seized dur­ing the search. He refused to give any infor­ma­tion to the inves­ti­ga­tors.

Ten days lat­er, on July 2, Ali­ak­san­dr Ziank­ou was trans­ferred to the Min­sk pre-tri­al deten­tion cen­ter. On Jan­u­ary 23 of this year, the Belaru­sian human rights com­mu­ni­ty rec­og­nized him as a polit­i­cal pris­on­er.

Ziank­ou has been work­ing as a free­lance pho­tog­ra­ph­er since 1998. He worked inde­pen­dent­ly as a pri­vate entre­pre­neur and col­lab­o­rat­ed with local inde­pen­dent pub­li­ca­tions. He also cre­at­ed award-win­ning doc­u­men­taries for Chris­t­ian film fes­ti­vals and Mag­nifikat TV shows after becom­ing inter­est­ed in videog­ra­phy. In 2015, the fes­ti­val jury rec­og­nized his cre­ative work on the recon­struc­tion of the church in the vil­lage of Zem­bin.

Before the arrest, he had been trav­el­ing exten­sive­ly and engag­ing in cre­ative work, cap­tur­ing land­scapes, nat­ur­al phe­nom­e­na, birds, and archi­tec­tur­al mon­u­ments. In Decem­ber 2022, he held a per­son­al pho­to exhi­bi­tion.

Read more:

Siarhei Hardziyevich, former political prisoner and journalist, detained for 15 days

Extremism and media

E‑NEWSLETTER: MASS MEDIA IN BELARUS IN 2023