Sports journo Alyaksandr Ivulin to stand trial in mid January

The tri­al is to be con­duct­ed by judge Syarhei Shat­si­la.

Ivulin was detained in ear­ly June in Min­sk. After spend­ing 30 days in the noto­ri­ous deten­tion cen­tre on Akrestsin Street, he was not released.

Notably, dur­ing Alyaksandr’s being in ‘Akrestsin’, food parcels were not being hand­ed over to pris­on­ers; they might be deprived of mat­tress­es and pil­lows; in most cas­es, inmates were tak­en out of the cells only when hand­cuffed and with their hands raised behind their backs. On the night of July 10, the jour­nal­ist was placed in remand prison Nr 1, where the con­fine­ment con­di­tions were report­ed to be bet­ter: inmates get mat­tress­es and bed­sheets, they even have a chance to take a show­er or watch TV.

Lat­er, the arrestee charged under Part 1 of Arti­cle 342 of the Crim­i­nal Code (‘organ­i­sa­tion and prepa­ra­tion of actions that gross­ly vio­late pub­lic order’). Accord­ing to the Belaru­sian author­i­ties, they have pho­tos of Alyak­san­dr going down the road­way dur­ing the protests, which gave ground for accus­ing him of ‘block­ing off traf­fic’. The max­i­mum pun­ish­ment under the arti­cle is three years in jail.

The Belaru­sian human rights com­mu­ni­ty recog­nised Alyak­san­dr Ivulin as a polit­i­cal pris­on­er.