Blogger Dzmitry Selviastruk recognized as political prisoner

He is accused of pro­mot­ing extrem­ist activ­i­ty and his case has been con­sid­ered by the Min­sk City Court since 29 Sep­tem­ber.

Dzmit­ry Selvi­as­truk is known to foot­ball fans as the per­son behind the Telegram chan­nel called Sil­ver Age. Belaru­sian Foot­ball. He made the lat­est post on May 5. On the same day, he informed his friends that a police offi­cer vis­it­ed him, but he would not open the door. Com­mu­ni­ca­tion with Selvi­as­truk has ceased ever since.

In May, he got arrest­ed and was lat­er tried twice for dis­trib­ut­ing “extrem­ist” con­tent, as per human rights activists. Since the blog­ger was not released post-tri­al, he is like­ly to have land­ed in admin­is­tra­tive cus­tody. Anoth­er tri­al was held on May 30.

While Selvi­as­truk was in admin­is­tra­tive cus­tody, he was charged with pro­mot­ing extrem­ist activ­i­ty and put in a remand cen­ter.

The result of Dzmit­ry Selviastruk’s crim­i­nal tri­al is cur­rent­ly unknown. His sen­tence has not yet been pub­lished in the Court Deci­sions data­base.

Read­ers of the Sil­ver Age. Belaru­sian Foot­ball Telegram chan­nel think that Selvi­as­truk was arrest­ed because of his neg­a­tive posts about cer­tain teams and sports man­agers in the country’s cham­pi­onship. The fol­low­ers noticed that it often shared inside infor­ma­tion that was based on rumors and com­ments from sev­er­al sports forums.

33-year-old Dzmit­ry Selvi­as­truk grad­u­at­ed from the jour­nal­ism depart­ment at Belaru­sian State Uni­ver­si­ty. He worked for a while at the state-run news­pa­per Nar­o­d­naya Gaze­ta and cov­ered social issues and the IT indus­try. He grad­u­al­ly shift­ed his focus to sports news and began col­lab­o­rat­ing with the niche media Football.by. He launched his own project, a Telegram chan­nel about Belaru­sian foot­ball, three years ago with about 2000 fol­low­ers.

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