September 20, 2020
This Week in Human Rights News
Alexander Lukashenko has been in power in Belarus for 26 years.
He is now Europe’s longest-serving leader.
On August 9, 2020, Belarus held national elections where Lukashenko was declared the winner in a landslide, with 80% of the vote.
The opposition alleges fraud and considers opposition leader Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, who has taken shelter in Lithuania, to be the real winner.
Tsikhanouskaya entered the presidential race after her husband Sergei Tikhanovsky and another candidate, Viktor Babariko, were jailed. A third, Valery Tsepkalo, was forced into exile.
The opposition movement was led by three women: Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, Tsepkalo's wife Veronika, and Babariko's campaign manager, Maria Kolesnikova.
Their grassroots movement gathered tens of thousands of supporters.
She was projected to win with 80% of the vote, but the regime-run election commission claimed she only won 10%.
Following the election results, protests erupted, gathering unprecedented crowds of hundreds of thousands in Minsk, the capital.
They are calling for Lukashenko's resignation.
Protesters were met with violent repression.
In the first few days after the vote, riot police arrested nearly 7,000 protesters and bystanders (over the course of 4 days).
They systematically beat and committed acts of torture against hundreds.
Authorities also arrested and deported dozens of journalists.
Most of the country’s political opposition leaders have been arrested or forced into exile.
Authorities have also threatened to fire people from their jobs for protesting.
For a time, the number of arrests dropped, but now they are ticking up again.
Police are detaining hundreds of people throughout the country, including students and prominent rights activists, grabbing them from home and work, accusing them of participating in past protests.
On September 17, they arrested Maria Ryabkova, a human rights defender with Viasna, one of Belarus’s top human rights groups, who documented police torture in recent weeks.
One of Tikhanovskaya's campaign partners, Maria Kolesnikova, has been imprisoned and charged with undermining national security.
Nina Bahinskaya, a 73-year-old great-grandmother who has become an icon of the protest movement, was arrested this Saturday at a Women's March.
Today, almost a month and a half after the contested election, tens of thousands of opposition supporters marched in Minsk despite authorities deploying a heavy police presence.
The protest comes after riot police cracked down on peaceful female demonstrators on Saturday who had come out wearing shiny accessories for a so-called "Sparkly March".
Police dragged protesters into vans, lifting some women off their feet and carried them.
Anonymous hackers also leaked the personal data of 1,000 Belarusian police officers in retaliation for a crackdown on street demonstrations this Saturday.
SOURCES: Al Jazeera, NPR, BBC, The Guardian, EuroNews, UN News, Human Rights Watch