Journalist Andrzej Poczobut sentenced to 8 years in prison

The tri­al began on 16 Jan­u­ary and was held in cam­era. Andrzej Poc­zobut was charged with encour­ag­ing actions aimed at harm­ing the nation­al secu­ri­ty of the Repub­lic of Belarus and incit­ing eth­nic hos­til­i­ty.

Judge Dzmit­ry Bubenchyk is known for his polit­i­cal sen­tences. He pun­ished peo­ple who con­demned the war in Ukraine, who expressed dis­agree­ment with Lukashenka’s regime and the use of vio­lence by secu­ri­ty forces.

An action of sol­i­dar­i­ty with Andrzej Poc­zobut, orga­nized by local activists, acquain­tances, col­leagues and friends of the jour­nal­ist, will take place today in Bia­lystok, Poland.

Andrzej Poc­zobut is a jour­nal­ist and a leader of the Union of Poles in Belarus that had been shut down by the author­i­ties. He was arrest­ed on 25 March 2021 in Hrod­na in the so-called “Pol­ish case,” togeth­er with oth­er activists of the Pol­ish minor­i­ty pub­lic orga­ni­za­tion.

Andrzej Poc­zobut was accused of “incit­ing eth­nic hos­til­i­ty” for his arti­cle about the Sovi­et attack on Poland in Sep­tem­ber 1939. In the text, Poc­zobut called the Sovi­et inva­sion of Poland in 1939 “aggres­sion”. He was also charged with state­ments in defense of the Pol­ish minor­i­ty in Belarus, arti­cles in the Pol­ish news­pa­per Gaze­ta Wybor­cza about the Belaru­sian protests in 2020, and a text in Mag­a­zyn Pol­s­ki ded­i­cat­ed to Ana­tol Radzivonik, one of the com­man­ders of the Pol­ish anti-par­ty under­ground in Hrod­na.

Dur­ing his almost two years in cus­tody, the journalist’s fam­i­ly could not vis­it him, his let­ters were cen­sored and cor­re­spon­dence with his 12-year-old son was blocked, while his lawyers remained silent for fear of being dis­barred.

Soon after his deten­tion, the author­i­ties start­ed pres­sur­ing the polit­i­cal pris­on­er to write a par­don peti­tion to Lukashen­ka, say­ing that the major­i­ty of “sep­a­ratists in the Pol­ish case” had already done so and were now in Poland or under house arrest. Andrzej Poc­zobut refused.

In one of his let­ters, the jour­nal­ist writes:

“Many things have changed, but in spite of this, I am in a good mood, and I am inspired by the fates of peo­ple impris­oned dur­ing Stalin’s times. With many of them I had the hon­or to be per­son­al­ly acquaint­ed. Now I remem­ber their sto­ries, and they – many already from the next world – give me faith, con­fi­dence and opti­mism.”