Exiled Belarusian opposition leader sentenced to 15 years in prison camp for ‘treason’ – National | 24CA News
Exiled Belarusian opposition chief Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya was handed a 15-year jail time period on Monday after being convicted in absentia for treason and “conspiracy to seize power,” a verdict she mentioned was punishment for her efforts to advertise democracy.
Tsikhanouskaya, 40, a former English instructor, fled to neighboring Lithuania in 2020 after operating in opposition to incumbent chief Alexander Lukashenko in a presidential election, which official outcomes confirmed Lukashenko gained by a landslide.
She and the opposition mentioned on the time that the outcomes had been doctored handy victory to Lukashenko as an alternative of herself. Lukashenko, who has dominated Belarus with an iron hand for practically 30 years, denied the declare.
Mass protests in opposition to Lukashenko, an in depth ally of Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, then erupted which his safety forces suppressed, locking up his opponents or forcing them to flee.
The authorities put Tsikhanouskaya, the opposition’s de-facto head, on trial in absentia in January, accusing her and different opposition figures of attempting to grab energy in an unconstitutional method.
Belta, the state news company, mentioned a court docket in Minsk had sentenced Tsikhanouskaya to fifteen years in a jail camp after discovering her responsible of treason and conspiracy to grab energy.
The identical court docket handed an 18-year jail sentence to Pavel Latushko, a outstanding member of the Belarusian opposition council, and 12-year jail sentences to 3 different activists convicted of being a part of the identical plot, Belta reported.
“15 years of prison. This is how the regime ‘rewarded’ my work for democratic changes in Belarus,” Tsikhanouskaya mentioned on Twitter.
“But today I don’t think about my own sentence. I think about thousands of innocents, detained & sentenced to real prison terms. I won’t stop until each of them is released.”
Rights activists estimate about 1,500 persons are in jail in Belarus on politically motivated expenses.
Tsikhanouskaya’s personal husband, Syarhei, is serving an 18-year jail time period after being discovered responsible in 2021 of organizing mass unrest in a ruling she mentioned was political revenge and a part of a crackdown by Lukashenko on anybody he considered as a menace.
Nobel Peace Prize winner and human rights activist Ales Bialiatski was sentenced to 10 years in jail on Friday by a court docket in Minsk in a trial condemned within the West as a “sham.”
Lukashenko, in energy since 1994, has accused the West of attempting to destabilize Belarus and promised to crack down laborious on any new makes an attempt to problem his rule.
(Reporting by Caleb Davis and Andrew Osborn; Editing by Gareth Jones)
