Larysa Shchyrakova transferred to Homel women’s correctional facility
The transfer did not take a long time, as she was previously held at Homel pre-trial detention center.
On August 31, Judge Mikalai Dolia of the Homel Regional Court sentenced a journalist to three and a half years in prison and fined her $1100. During the trial, Larysa Shchyrakova announced that she would not appeal the verdict, as she believed it was not worth pursuing since no convicted journalists or public figures had managed to have their sentence commuted in a higher court. Recently, she was moved to the correctional facility for women in Homel.
The correctional facility consists of several two-story brick barracks constructed in the 1970s, a medical center, a laundry, and sewing workshops.
Larysa Shchyrakova will spend a considerable amount of time there: approximately two and a half years. The eight months she spent on remand count as 12 months in prison. She celebrated her 50th birthday while incarcerated.
The former journalist was arrested in Homel on December 6, 2022. Her son Sviataslau was sent to a children’s home until his father came to take him out of the system.
Shchyrakova was found guilty of “discrediting the Republic of Belarus” and “promoting extremist activities”. The details of the charges against the journalist are unknown, but it’s believed she disseminated “untrue” information about Belarus online. It’s also unclear what her involvement in “extremist activities” was. Attorney Viktoria Famenka, who represented Shchyrakova, signed a non-disclosure obligation.
The journalist was accused of gathering, producing, managing, storing, and disseminating audio, video, photo, and text data to aid the extremist operations of the Viasna Human Rights Center and Belsat TV channel.
On 3 November 2021, the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Republic of Belarus recognized the TV channel Belsat and its social media pages as extremist formations. The same happened during Shchyrakova’s trial with the Homel chapter of Viasna. The fact that the woman publicly announced her decision to leave journalism two years ago, before Belsat or Viasna were labeled as extremist formations, did not influence the court’s ruling.
On September 22, the Belarusian Ministry of Internal Affairs included Larysa Shchyrakova on the List of Belarusian Citizens, Foreign Citizens, and Stateless Individuals Engaged in Extremist Activities. This occurred three weeks after the verdict.
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