Belarus criminal justice system ‘weaponized’: UN

Belarusian authorities are using the country’s criminal justice system as an instrument of repression to systematically target government opponents, UN investigators said yesterday.

A group of independent UN experts at the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights tasked with probing the rights situation in Belarus determined that the country had for years “weaponized” its judicial system, “creating a system of punishment and legal sanctions against any form of dissent, real or perceived.”

“What emerges is not a picture of isolated violations, but of a system in which state institutions have systematically been used to suppress dissent and fundamental freedoms,” group chairwoman Karinna Moskalenko said in a statement.

Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko attends a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, not pictured, at the Novo-Ogaryovo state residence outside Moscow on Aug. 29.

Photo: Reuters

“Criminal justice processes are an integral part of a broader machinery of repression,” she said, adding that “their impacts are felt not only by those arrested, prosecuted or imprisoned, but by an entire society being warned about the price of dissent.”

The expert group was created in April 2024 by the office to investigate violations committed in Belarus since 2020, when the country was gripped by unprecedented anti-government demonstrations followed by a brutal crackdown.

In their first report last year, the experts determined that some of the abuses by Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko’s government since then amounted to crimes against humanity.

The latest report looked specifically at the judicial system, documenting abuses at every stage of the process.

Arrests were often “arbitrary” and “violent,” and carried out by plain-clothes officers without warrants, who frequently denied arrestees access to lawyers and forced them to record humiliating “repentance” videos, the experts said.

Detainees were held in “overcrowded, excessively hot and unsanitary cells, often without enough beds and infested with bedbugs, while being deprived of adequate food and sleep,” the report found.

It highlighted gender-specific abuses, including invasive strip searches of female detainees in view of male guards and the deliberate denial of basic menstrual hygiene products.

Trials against political opponents, journalists and rights activists in particular were riddled with systematic violations of fair-trial guarantees, with defendants kept in metal cages in the courtroom and their defense lawyers often disbarred or detained, the experts found.

Once convicted, detainees held on politically motivated grounds were marked with yellow tags and systematically subjected to “discrimination, inhuman conditions of detention, cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment and incommunicado detention,” the report said.

Among other things, former detainees interviewed for the report described facing repeated punishment for “alleged disciplinary violations,” including being held in frosty isolation cells, referred to as “torture by cold.”

State persecution continued even after release, with courts frequently ordering lengthy and intrusive preventive supervision, the report said.

That exposed former prisoners to nighttime raids by security forces, movement restrictions and immediate rearrest for minor schedule deviations, it found.

“Releases ... cannot be mistaken for an end to repression,” expert Monika Platek said in the statement.

The experts called on Belarusian authorities to immediately release all those held on politically motivated charges and to promptly investigate and prosecute all allegations of rights violations. They also urged other countries to step up pressure on Belarus.

“The international community must not look away,” expert Susan Bazilli said. “Those responsible for serious human rights violations must know that impunity is not a permanent shield, and victims must know that their rights have not been forgotten.”