Journalist Pavel Padabed not released after 72-hour detention

Accord­ing to the new infor­ma­tion, last Fri­day Pavel Pad­abed went to the post office to make a pay­ment. He nev­er reached the next place he had intend­ed to vis­it – sud­den­ly, he could not be reached any­more. So there’s a good chance he was detained at the post office.

Pavel called his fam­i­ly to inform them about his arrest and a search of his home but did not spec­i­fy the charges.

On 23 Jan­u­ary, 72 hours of pre­lim­i­nary deten­tion had passed, but the jour­nal­ist was not released. It is not known where he is held at the moment.

This is not Pavel’s first encounter with the law enforce­ment sys­tem. After the 2010 pres­i­den­tial elec­tion and the ensu­ing pub­lic protests, the jour­nal­ist was repeat­ed­ly arrest­ed, includ­ing for cov­er­ing a “silent march” in 2011 as part of the “Rev­o­lu­tion Through Social Media” protest or dur­ing per­for­mances orga­nized by the Tell the Truth cam­paign activists dur­ing ear­ly vot­ing in the par­lia­men­tary elec­tions.

In the fall of 2020, when Belarus was gripped by mass protests against stolen elec­tion results and the sub­se­quent use of vio­lence by the police, Pavel Pad­abed was also arrest­ed for his jour­nal­is­tic work. The deten­tion did not result in fur­ther per­se­cu­tion, though.

But the sit­u­a­tion is rad­i­cal­ly dif­fer­ent now – many peo­ple who doc­u­ment­ed the dra­mat­ic events of 2020 have been put behind bars. The rel­e­vant exam­ples are video­g­ra­phers Ali­ak­san­dr Lubianchuk, who was sen­tenced to three years of impris­on­ment for “par­tic­i­pa­tion in an extrem­ist for­ma­tion,” and Ivan Murauy­ou, who received a two-and-a-half-year sen­tence on a sim­i­lar charge.