The ‘Regnum’ Authors Found Guilty by Court but Released in the Court Room

All of them were released from cus­tody in the court room, due to the changed mea­sure of restraint. Paulavets, Alimkin, and Shypten­ka were pun­ished by 5 years’ impris­on­ment, sus­pend­ed for three years. All of them will be released under recog­ni­zance not to leave the place of their res­i­dence before the sen­tence comes into force.

As soon as the sen­tence was announced, Siarhei Shypten­ka stat­ed that he would appeal against the court ver­dict and con­tin­ue to con­tribute pub­li­ca­tions to the Russ­ian Web-sites.

Shypten­ka added that all that [i.e., lit­i­ga­tion – editor’s note] was an unad­e­quate reac­tion to the expressed by him words and views.

‘I hope that fun­da­men­tal rights and lib­er­ties, which have been giv­en us at great cost will not be lost,’ not­ed Shypten­ka.

The Pub­lic Pros­e­cu­tor Ali­ak­san­dr Karol want­ed to sen­tence the con­vict­ed ‘Reg­num’ cor­re­spon­dents to 5 years of impris­on­ment, sus­pend­ed for three years. 

The whole group of con­vict­ed ‘Reg­num’ authors has already spent more than a year behind bars. Anoth­er per­son involved in the case, the ‘Reg­num’ Chief Edi­tor Yury Baranchyk was detained on request of Belaru­sian author­i­ties in Moscow in March 2017. How­ev­er, he was released some time lat­er. It should be men­tioned that a crim­i­nal case has been filed against Mr. Baranchyk in Belarus.

‘The applied mech­a­nisms and meth­ods are wor­ry­ing from the point of view of free­dom of expres­sion, since such tools can even­tu­al­ly be used in rela­tion to any per­son, who crit­i­cizes the author­i­ties or, e.g., reveals the Russ­ian impe­ri­al­is­tic poli­cies,’ not­ed a media expert Ali­ak­san­dr Klask­ous­ki, com­ment­ing upon the case.