Syarhei Kavalenka will not survive transfer to psychiatric hospital

Political prisoner Syarhei Kavalenka is expected to be taken to the Navinki psychiatric hospital in Minsk in the nearest days.

Alena, the wife of the Vitebsk-based activist of CCP-BPF party Syarhei Kavalenka, fears her husband might not survive the transfer to the Navinki republican psychiatric hospital in Minsk.

On April 10, the judicial board of the Vitebsk region court appointed a comprehensive psychiatric examination in hospital for Syarhei Kavalenka.

“I don't know how he can survive this transfer in his state, during the hunger strike,” Alena Kavalenka told BelaPAN. “I have two thoughts on the matter. The first one is that he will die on the way to hospital and then all questions will be closed. The second one is that he will be declared insane. It means all ideas he is struggling for will be discredited and he will be treated forcefully in a manner of Soviet-style punitive psychiatry,” the wife of the opposition activist says.

Alena also worries none of Syarhei's relatives and friends has not seen him for the last three days. “A lawyer was denied access to him yesterday, April 9. He was not taken to court today. His mother tried to visit him in Vitba-3 penal colony today, but a doctor said Syarhei had got a sedative injection and would sleep till evening,” Alena Kavalenka said.

We remind Syarhei Kavalenka tries to appeal against the court decision delivered on February 24 by the Pershamaiski district court of Vitebsk. The court found him guilty of a probation violation (article 415 of the Criminal Code). The activist was given a 3-year suspended sentence in May 2010 for hanging out a national white-red-white flag on Vitebsk's Christmas Tree. Kavalenka has been in custody since his arrest on December 19, 2011.

The activist of the CCP-BPF party went on hunger strike, during which he lost half his body weight. According to his wife Alena he weights about 45 kilograms instead of his normal weight of 83 kilograms. Syarhei Kavalenka is in a psychiatric unit in a hospital of Vitba-3 penal colony.