In Belarus, a lawyer was sentenced to 10 years for legal assistance to Gerasimene
On Monday, April 10, the Minsk City Court sentenced Belarusian lawyer Alexander Danilevich to 10 years in prison. Human rights activist Dmitry Laevsky announced this on his Telegram channel. According to him, such a severe sentence was handed down “for legal assistance and interview.”
Case of lawyer Alexander Danilevich
Danilevich was arrested in May 2022. According to the Belarusian edition “Nasha Niva”this came shortly after he “signed the anti-war appeal of lawyers and lawyers on actions in Ukraine”.
The lawyer was charged under two articles of the Criminal Code of the Republic of Belarus: complicity in public calls for actions aimed at causing harm to the national security of the Republic of Belarus and assistance in extremist activities.
The prosecution alleged that Danilevich, “being a lawyer, a candidate of legal sciences, possessing special knowledge in the field of jurisprudence”, deliberately helped his clients – athletes Alexandra Gerasimene and Alexander Opeykin – “by giving legal advice in the field of international defense sports law” , recalls Dmitry Laevsky .
“Supposedly, his legal advice contributed to the preparation of resources that Gerasimenya and Opeikin sent to international sports organizations – in particular, the International Olympic Committee, the International Ski Federation”, he clarifies. According to Belarusian authorities, these appeals contained “deliberately false information” about events in Belarus after the 2020 presidential elections.
Assistance to strike committees in Belarus
The prosecution also claims that, in addition to the athletes, Danilevich assisted “unidentified persons” who, after the elections of 9 August 2020, formed strike committees in Belaruskali OJSC, “providing legal advice in the field of international law”, the right human rights activist writes. In particular, the prosecution considered that Danilevsky helped to prepare an appeal to the Norwegian company Yara, which was a large buyer of Belarusian potash products, after which this company stopped buying.
As for the accusations of facilitating extremist activities, they, according to Laevsky, were based on the fact that Danilevich “gave an interview on Telegram to one of the sports channels that is not on the list of extremists, and thereafter this interview was reprinted in the “media ” extremist.
Source: DW
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