Political prisoner and blogger Pavel Vinahradau transferred to high-security prison

Svi­at­lana Vinahra­da­va, the wife of the polit­i­cal pris­on­er, report­ed this on Face­book.

Pavel Vinahradau is a pub­lic fig­ure, blog­ger, and TV pre­sen­ter. On 22 Decem­ber 2021, Pavel was detained in Berazi­no, where he lived with his fam­i­ly. He was charged under three crim­i­nal arti­cles for his Face­book post: incit­ing racial, nation­al, reli­gious, or oth­er social enmi­ty; orga­niz­ing and prepar­ing actions that gross­ly vio­late pub­lic order or active­ly par­tic­i­pat­ing in them; and defam­ing the Pres­i­dent.

On 16 March 2022, Pavel Vinahradau was sen­tenced to five years in prison.

The rea­son for his trans­fer is still unknown. How­ev­er, it is report­ed that the admin­is­tra­tion of Cor­rec­tion­al Facil­i­ty 11 in Vaukavysk cre­at­ed unbear­able con­di­tions for the polit­i­cal pris­on­er this year. Pavel revealed that he spent almost half a year – with small breaks – in a pun­ish­ment cell, only to be lat­er put in a Secure Hous­ing Unit (SHU).

In the sum­mer of 2022, he was diag­nosed with tuber­cu­lo­sis and trans­ferred to spe­cial­ized Cor­rec­tion­al Facil­i­ty 12 in Orsha, where he lost 36 kilo­grams.

How­ev­er, despite his bad health, the admin­is­tra­tion of that insti­tu­tion placed him in seg­re­ga­tion for a month and denied him food parcels from his rel­a­tives. Vinahradau was then held in a SHU for six months. In Feb­ru­ary of this year, after com­plet­ing his treat­ment in CF-12, he was returned to Vaukavysk.

The activist has become a polit­i­cal pris­on­er for the sec­ond time. Last time he received a four-year prison sen­tence for par­tic­i­pat­ing in protests fol­low­ing the 2010 pres­i­den­tial elec­tion.

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