A journalist for Polish television channel Belsat Irina Slavnikova has been sentenced to 15 days of arrest in Belarus, the unregistered Belarusian human rights center Viasna said in a statement on Nov. 1.
“Irina Slavnikova has been sentenced to a 15-day arrest,” Viasna said.
Slavnikova was charged with keeping extremist materials on her Facebook page. They are materials of Belsat and Zerkalo, a project launched by journalists of the Tut.by the news website, whose materials have also been designated as extremist in Belarus, the human rights center said. All of these materials were published before being declared extremist, it said.
Slavnikova’s husband, Alexander Loiko, was sentenced to 15 days in jail earlier on Nov. 1. Loiko was charged with reposting (keeping) extremist materials. According to Viasna, they are Belsat articles dating back to 2017-2019.
As reported, the spouses were detained at the Minsk airport on Oct. 30, after returning from Egypt.
The Zheleznodorozhny District Court of Gomel designated the website and social media pages of the Belsat television channel as extremist in Belarus on July 27 of this year based on the results of an inspection carried out by the Belarusian Interior Ministry’s department for the fight against organized crime and corruption control for the Gomel region.
A Minsk court handed down two-year prison sentences to the channel’s journalists Darya Chultsova and Yekaterina Andreyeva in February 2021. They were charged with being actively involved in and coordinating “group activities that constituted grave public order offenses” and disrupted the functioning of public transport.
Andreyeva and Chultsova were detained at an unauthorized protest in Minsk on Nov. 15, 2020. They were live-streaming for the Belsat TV channel from an apartment on the 14th floor of a building on Smorgovsky Trakt Street, in the so-called Square of Changes district of the city, to which they were invited by the apartment’s owners. Law enforcement agencies detained several dozen people and used riot equipment to disperse the protest in the area that day.
Belsat is a Belarusian-language television channel. It was established under an agreement between the Polish Foreign Ministry and the Telewizja Polska broadcasting corporation. In 2014, the Belarusian Supreme Court ordered the Polish television channel to cease using the Belsat trademark when broadcasting in Belarus.
The TV channel is not accredited in Belarus.
Belarus saw more than six months of continuous protests against the official results of the presidential election that took place on Aug. 9, 2020. The authorities declared incumbent President Alexander Lukashenko the winner. Lukashenko has been in office since 1994. The opposition does not recognize the results of the presidential election, saying the election was rigged. Several opposition leaders were arrested. The protesters demanded Lukashenko’s resignation, the release of political prisoners, and a new election. The protests, which were fiercely dispersed by Belarusian security services, have virtually subsided, becoming rare and limited of late.
The European Union and the United States do not recognize Lukashenko as the legitimate president of Belarus and have imposed sanctions on the country.
