Today is Day of Solidarity

Rallies of solidarity are to be held in our country and all over the world to support Belarusians fighting for freedom.

Participants of February 16 actions of solidarity, which will be held in Minsk and other Belarusian cities, are going to remind that prisoners of conscience are still kept in Belarusian jails, cases of abducted and murdered opposition leaders are not being investigated.

Vaukavysk businessmen Mikalai Autukhovich and Uladzimir Asipenka, arrested in February 2009, as well as Young Front activist Artsyom Dubski are in prisons.

Political prisoner Mikalai Autukhovich was persecuted for his active struggle for the rights of entrepreneurs. Human rights activists think he and Uladzimir Asipenka are accused of committing grave crimes without any ground and will stand a trial behind closed doors. Autukhovich went on a 90-day hunger strike in protest that ruined his health.

The Supreme Court has been considering the case of the entrepreneurs since March 10.

Artsyom Dubski, “Young Front” activist, in July was sentenced to a year of imprisonment in a colony for violation of rules of serving the sentence under the well-known Case of Fourteen. Fourteen young activists were sentenced to restriction or deprivation of liberty for participation in protest rallies of businessmen.

The cases relating disappearances of opposition leaders Viktar Hanchar, Yury Zakharanka, Anatol Krasouski and a journalist Zmitser Zavadski in 1999-2000 are still not investigated in Belarus. The world community suspects high-ranking Belarusian officials close to Alyaksandr Lukashenka are responsible for these abductions.

Repressions against dissenters in Belarus, independent journalists, opposition activists, representatives of the civil society, are continued.