Petersburg’s Vasileostrovskiy District Court on Friday, July 29, extended the arrest of 25-year-old Belarusian citizen Yana Pinchuk for three months. As the RusNews Telegram channel points out, the prosecution insisted on extending the girl’s detention in the preventive detention center, as this is necessary “to agree the place and time of her transfer to the competent authorities of the Republic of Belarus.”

Earlier, a Russian court upheld the decision to extradite Pinchuk to Belarus, where she is accused of running the Telegram channel “Vitebsk 97%”, which the Belarusian court recognized as “extremist”. The girl was detained in Russia in autumn 2021 at the request of Belarus, has been in a preventive detention center since November and has complained several times about the conditions of her detention. She pleaded not guilty.

Lawyers tried to appeal the decision of the Office of the Prosecutor General of the Russian Federation to extradite Pinchuk, and the UN Human Rights Committee opposed that decision, but the Russian court upheld it.

Lukashenko continues to look for “extremists” in the country

In July 2022, human rights activists from the Human Constanta center presented a report on the activities of the center to combat “extremism” in Belarus – according to him, since the 2020 elections, which led to a wave of protests in the country, which were harshly repressed by order of the declared victory in the elections Alexander Lukashenko, the number of “extremist” cases continues to grow in Belarus.

In addition to hunting activists, the Belarusian authorities have expanded the list of reasons why citizens can be recognized as “extremists” – the concept of “extremist formations” appeared in the republic’s legislation, which, due to the imprecision of the wording, can be recognized as almost any association of citizens. Furthermore, recognition of such “formations” is carried out by state bodies without judgment and, according to Belarusian human rights activists, someone can be considered a member of such a formation simply by signing up to a “prohibited” page on social media. . Also in July, the activities of all non-state unions were banned in the country.