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  • The ‘Regnum’ Authors Found Guilty by Court but Released in the Court Room

    Yury Paulavets, Dzmitry Alimkin, and Siarhei Shyptenka have been found guilty of collective incitement of hatred on the ground of national identity (article 130 of Belarus Criminal Court).

    https://baj.media/sites/default/files/event/preview/ced7bd84-9740-44a3-8364-b71f75f9d28f_w1597_n_r0_s_0.jpg

    All of them were released from cus­tody in the court room, due to the changed mea­sure of restraint. Paulavets, Alimkin, and Shypten­ka were pun­ished by 5 years’ impris­on­ment, sus­pend­ed for three years. All of them will be released under recog­ni­zance not to leave the place of their res­i­dence before the sen­tence comes into force.

    As soon as the sen­tence was announced, Siarhei Shypten­ka stat­ed that he would appeal against the court ver­dict and con­tin­ue to con­tribute pub­li­ca­tions to the Russ­ian Web-sites.

    Shypten­ka added that all that [i.e., lit­i­ga­tion – editor’s note] was an unad­e­quate reac­tion to the expressed by him words and views.

    ‘I hope that fun­da­men­tal rights and lib­er­ties, which have been giv­en us at great cost will not be lost,’ not­ed Shypten­ka.

    The Pub­lic Pros­e­cu­tor Ali­ak­san­dr Karol want­ed to sen­tence the con­vict­ed ‘Reg­num’ cor­re­spon­dents to 5 years of impris­on­ment, sus­pend­ed for three years. 

    The whole group of con­vict­ed ‘Reg­num’ authors has already spent more than a year behind bars. Anoth­er per­son involved in the case, the ‘Reg­num’ Chief Edi­tor Yury Baranchyk was detained on request of Belaru­sian author­i­ties in Moscow in March 2017. How­ev­er, he was released some time lat­er. It should be men­tioned that a crim­i­nal case has been filed against Mr. Baranchyk in Belarus.

    ‘The applied mech­a­nisms and meth­ods are wor­ry­ing from the point of view of free­dom of expres­sion, since such tools can even­tu­al­ly be used in rela­tion to any per­son, who crit­i­cizes the author­i­ties or, e.g., reveals the Russ­ian impe­ri­al­is­tic poli­cies,’ not­ed a media expert Ali­ak­san­dr Klask­ous­ki, com­ment­ing upon the case.

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