OSCE condemns jailing of rights activist in Belarus

TÁNAISTE EAMON Gilmore, who currently chairs the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, has condemned Belarus for confirming the jail sentence of human rights activist Ales Bialiatski and for imprisoning other critics of president Alexander Lukashenko.

Mr Lukashenko’s feared KGB security service launched a crackdown on his opponents to quash dissent following his allegedly fraudulent re-election in December 2010. The former state farm boss has ruled Belarus since 1994, crushing political rivals and free media, and he has tightened his grip in recent months amid a severe economic crisis.

“I urge the Belarusian authorities to immediately release Ales Bialiatski and all other civil society activists and political opponents,” Mr Gilmore, who is also Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade, said.

“The continued erosion of human rights in the country is very worrying. By persecuting human rights defenders and limiting the freedom of association, Belarus is falling short of its OSCE commitments.”

Mr Bialiatski was sentenced to 4½ years in jail last November for tax evasion relating to funds received from western donors.

Poland and Lithuania – two major supporters of Belarus’s democracy movement – mistakenly gave information to Belarus that helped convict him. A court in the Belarusian capital Minsk this week rejected Mr Bialiatski’s appeal.

More than 700 people were arrested during the protests that followed the December 2010 election. Most were subsequently freed, but two opposition candidates in the vote, Andrei Sannikov and Mikola Statkevich, were jailed for five and six years respectively.

The media freedom chief of the 56-nation OSCE, Dunja Mijatovic, this month condemned Belarus for jailing cameraman Ales Barazenka for 11 days for filming a one-man protest outside the KGB headquarters, and called on Minsk to “stop harassing him and other journalists”.

In its annual report, US-based human rights group Freedom House this month placed Belarus near the bottom of its freedom index. The group also gave Kazakhstan a lower ranking than last year, and joined Human Rights Watch yesterday in condemning the country’s arrest of opposition activists and at least one journalist during an investigation into deadly riots in a oil town last month.

Critics of President Nursultan Nazarbayev, who has run oil- and gas- rich Kazakhstan since 1989, say he is using that investigation as a pretext to suppress opponents, after a general election in which his party took more than 80 per cent of votes.

After OSCE monitors strongly criticised the conduct of the ballot, Mr Nazarbayev threatened to bar western observers from future elections, despite Kazakhstan leading the OSCE two years ago.

“Kazakhstan, as a former chair of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, must live up to its promise to the international community that it will advance democracy and human rights,” said Susan Corke, director for Eurasia programmes at Freedom House. “The actions of the authorities . . . undermine respect for fundamental freedoms.”