Three contributors of the Russian news outlet Regnum indicted in Belarus for anti-Belarusian publications
The Minsk City Court sentenced three contributors of the Russian news agency, Regnum, to five years in prison with the sentence being suspended for three years for fueling ethnic hostilities.
As Interfax reported, the journalists were freed in the courtroom after they signed an agreement not to leave the country.
In particular, the court found an associate professor of the Belarusian State University of Informatics and Radioelectronics, Yuriy Pavlovets, a security guard working in Brest, Dmitry Alimkin, and Editor-in-Chief of the Novaya Economika [New Economics] magazine, Sergey Shiptenko, guilty of instigating ethnic, national, and religious hatred in their publications in Russian online media.
The court sentenced them to five years in prison with the term suspended for three years. After this time, in accordance with article 77 of the Belarusian Penal Code, the court may decide to free the convicts, prolong the suspended sentence, or send them to prison.
The above contributors of Regnum were detained in December 2016. The detention was initiated by the Ministry of Information of the Republic of Belarus after it decided to review news reports and other publications for signs of extremism. A criminal case was opened based on the results of a forensic linguistic expert examination.
The Chairperson of the Presidential Council for Civil Society and Human Rights in the Russian Federation, Mikhail Fedotov, said he deeply regretted the court’s sentence. “I can only express my regret. At least, they delayed the execution of the sentence. But we believe there were no reasons to charge them with a criminal act,” he said.
The Managing Director of the news agency, Yuriy Baranchik, was detained in Moscow in March 2017. His arrest was carried out by Minsk authorities as a Russian court refused to arrest the journalist.