First modification:
Russian news agencies Interfax and RIA Novosti said a document on a Belarusian national legal website showed that Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko signed amendments previously approved by Parliament, legitimizing the death penalty for attempted acts of terrorism. Belarus is the only country on the European continent where the death penalty is still in force.
This Wednesday, May 18, Belarus expanded the death penalty law to include attempted terrorism and assassinations of government officials as grounds for sentencing.
The former Soviet nation already had the death penalty for acts of terrorism that cause loss of life, for brutal murders and for multiple murders.
According to Russian media, the Lower House of the Belarusian Parliament was in charge of approving the modification of the Criminal Code in two readings. The law will enter into force 10 days after its publication.
The change in the law, signed by the authoritarian president, Alexander Lukashenko, was announced after activists tried to sabotage the country’s railway network to prevent the deployment of Russian troops in Ukraine, as part of their invasion objective.
Although Belarus denies having helped its close ally, Russia, as a base to deploy its troops on Ukrainian soil on February 24, it does acknowledge that its territory was used in the invasion.
“The destructive forces continue terrorist and extremist activity trying to shake the situation in Belarus, provoking instability and internal conflicts,” said the chamber’s speaker, Vladimir Andreychenko, referring to the attempts to disrupt the railway.
A law under the shadow of Lukashenko’s authoritarianism
After the massive and chaotic protests two years ago in which Belarusians demonstrated against the re-election of Alexander Lukashenko, who has ruled the country with a heavy hand for more than 20 years, around 35,000 people were arrested during the crackdown. and the main leaders of the opposition movement are now behind bars or in exile.
After winning his sixth term in the disputed 2020 presidential election, in March 2021 the Attorney General’s Office launched a criminal case against opposition leaders Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya and Pavel Latushka, among others.
Announcing the amendment on Wednesday, Tikhanovskaya denounced the “lawless regime” decision, saying the legislation directly targets anti-government activists.
“This is a direct threat to activists who oppose the dictator and the war. I urge the international community to react: sanction legislators and consider any tool to prevent political assassinations,” Tikhanovskaya said on her Twitter account, while the United States United States also condemned the new legislation.
“These actions are those of an authoritarian leader desperate to cling to power through fear and intimidation,” said US Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
The harsh repression of the Belarusian government during the protests and its alleged support for Moscow’s military campaign has brought a package of sanctions on Belarus and its leaders from the West.
The ‘Belarus Helsinki Committee’, the ‘Viasna’ human rights center and the ‘Human Rights Against the Death Penalty’ group issued a joint statement calling the law a means of creating “prerequisites for serious abuses and the arbitrary application of the death penalty”.
The death penalty in Belarus
Despite the fact that capital punishment is carried out secretly and there are no official statistics on those sentenced to death, political opposition officials expressed concern that with the change in the law, some people who were previously accused of committing crimes considered as simple abuses, they could now be labeled as terrorists and could be sentenced to death.
The Belarusian Investigative Committee said a citizen was charged with terrorism for pouring red paint on a judge’s car and another person had been charged with committing acts of terrorism after he threw a stone at a prosecutor’s window.
The last death sentence, which is carried out by shooting in the European country, was carried out against Victor Pavlov, who was arrested in 2019 on suspicion of murder and robbery, according to reports from the United Nations Human Rights Committee.
In this particular case, UN officials called for Pavlov’s execution to be stopped, but when speaking with the family of the accused, they assured that the man had been executed without any information on the date or place, and that he was taken to carried out while his case was pending before the international committee.
With Reuters and AP
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