Aleh Vouchak complains to UN about illegal arrest

Aleh Vouchak, the head of Legal Assistance to Citizens human rights centre, applied to the UN Human Rights Committee.

In his complaint, he describes facts of systematic violations of the rights to freedom and personal security in Belarus and points at politically motivated discrimination of opponents of the authorities, Viasna human rights centre reports.  

The complaint was made with the help of human rights activist Leanid Sudalenka. He says Aleh Vouchak draws attention to the facts that police officers accuse innocent people of swearing, give false evidence at trials and judges sentence people to custody. It often occurs ahead of significant political events or when the authorities want to isolate a citizen.

“A court gave me four days in custody on January 30, 2012. Police officers Alyaksandr Shakhlai and district police inspector from Minsk's Tsentralny district police department gave false evidence against me. The policemen said I had been swearing in public, swinging my arms, shouting loudly and hadn't responded to remarks,” Aleh Vouchak recalls.

He says policemen Dzmitry Tukaila and Alyaksandr Kanin accused him of swearing on May 24, 2012. They gave false evidence at the trial and the human rights activist was sentenced to 9 days in custody.

Before the first detention, Aleh Vouchak was to meet with a person to get some documents proving the political nature of a recent high-profile criminal case. The human rights activists links his second detention to the international conferences in the US and the UK on modernisation of the Belarusian judicial system that he planned to visit.