March 7 is Yana Palyakova’s death anniversary

A human rights activist Yana Palyakova was driven to a suicide in March 2009. The entire range of cruel and mean methods was used against the young women.

Arrests, tortures, criminal persecution, moral terror, were used. The largest newspaper in Belarus, the propaganda mouthpiece of Lukashenka’s administration “Sovetskaya Belorussiya”, joined the harassment campaign.

Yana Palyakova, a lawyer, was an activist of “Legal assistance to population” organisation. She cooperated with other human rights organisations; she was a member of the initiative group of Volha Kazulina (the daughter of the well-known oppositional politician) in the parliamentary election in 2008.

Cynically accused of “false denunciation” against a policeman who had beaten her, Palyakova was sentenced to two years of restraint of liberty. Her friends say, Palyakova stated some days before the suicide: “The sentence will never take effect.” Yana devoted her life to struggle against injustice and didn’t allow the injustice to happen. The sentence didn’t really take effect.

The young woman committed suicide on March 8, 2009 overnight. The tragedy took place in the flat where Yana lived with her mother.

On March 6, 2009, before the tragedy, “Sovetskaya Belorussiya” published a satirical article about Belarusian human rights activists, where Yana Palyakova was mentioned among others, according to Yana’s friends, this article was the last drop which made the cup of her patience run over.

On March 18 the prosecutor’s office of Salihorsk refused opening a criminal case on the fact of Palyakova to suicide. Officials found no proofs that the human rights activist had been driven to suicide.

As a human rights activist Aleh Vouchak said, on March 6 human rights activists visited the cemetery where Palyakova is buried.

Human rights activists many times applied for Yana Palyakova’s vindication. “In our attempts we reached the chairman of Minsk regional court. However, we received formal replies, though lawyers with whom we worked, to my mind have collected satisfactory evidence to make a case of Palyakova’s being driven to a suicide. The suit against “Sovetskaya Belorussiya” for defence of honour and dignity was dismissed as well. A year has passed, but Palyakova’s mother has not received an order of the prosecutor’s office of Salihorsk that the criminal case is dismissed, and it is impossible to take an appeal in a higher prosecutor’s office without this document,” Vouchak said.

In 2009 Yana Palyakova became a winner (posthumously) of the National Human Rights Award in the nomination “For Personal Courage”, founded by Charter’97.