KYIV, Ukraine (AP) – Belarussian authorities on Tuesday raided the homes and offices of journalists and human rights activists in the latest move to disperse protest rallies against authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko.
Police searched the offices of the Belarusian Association of Journalists and the Viasna Human Rights Center, as well as the apartments of its members and confiscated their equipment. According to activists, more than 30 people were briefly detained, and at least three remained in police custody.
The greatest envoy of human rights in Europe described the searches and detention in Belarus as unacceptable.
“Freedom of expression, association and assembly must be ensured by international human rights standards,” Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights Dunja Mijatovic said on Twitter.
The leader of the Belarusian Association of Journalists, Andrei Bastunets, was one of those detained and later released.
“This is the biggest repression ever against journalists and rights activists that Europe has ever seen,” said Boris Goretsky, vice president of the association, whose house was also searched. “There have been more than 400 arrests of journalists in the last six months, and the authorities will not stop there.”
At least ten of them faced criminal charges and remained in custody.
Authorities also raided the headquarters of the Viasna Human Rights Center in Minsk on Tuesday and searched the apartments of several of its activists, including the group’s head, Ales Bialiatsky.
“This is an attempt to intimidate journalists and human rights activists who have told the world about the incredible scale of repression,” said Valiantsin Stefanovic, deputy head of Viasna.
At least three Visna activists remained in their police custody after their arrest earlier Tuesday.
Belarus has been shocked by protests since the official results of the presidential election on August 9 gave Lukashenko a sixth term on a large scale. The main candidate of the opposition, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, and her supporters dismissed the result as rude, and some voters also described the manipulation of the vote.
Authorities responded to protests, the largest of which attracted up to 200,000 people, with widespread repression. According to human rights advocates, more than 30,000 people have been detained since the protests began, and thousands of them have been brutally beaten.
The United States and the European Union responded to the election and the repression by imposing sanctions on Belarusian officials.
The inquiry committee, the country’s largest state investigation agency, said the investigations on Tuesday were part of an investigation into the financing of the protests.
Tsikhanouskaya denounced the raids and detention of journalists and rights activists, saying “the government is letting go of the oppression of human rights activists.”
Amnesty International has denounced the raids as a new increase in retaliation against disagreement.
“This is clearly a centrally organized and purposeful effort to reduce the country’s independent media and human rights organizations through horrific home attacks, harassment and persecution,” Aisha Jung, the group’s senior campaigner on Belarus, said in a statement. . “The authorities want to prevent them and discourage others from carrying out their critical and legitimate human rights and journalistic work.”
The European Federation of Journalists (EFJ) and the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) have demanded that Belarussian authorities stop prosecuting journalists.
“We strongly condemn this violent violence and repression and demand that the Lukashenko government stop the harassment of our colleagues,” IFJ President Younes Mjahed said in a statement.