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  • Barysau photographer Aliaksandr Ziankou sentenced to 3 years in prison

    Judge Zhanna Brysina of the Minsk City Court found Aliaksandr Ziankou guilty of participating in an extremist formation. The trial began on January 12, and three court hearings were held. On January 30, he was sentenced to three years of imprisonment.

    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

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