Good Reason To Support Political Prisoner Zmitser Palienka Appears

The youth activist Zmitser Palienka celebrates his 23rd anniversary today.

Unfortunately, he will celebrate his birthday behind the bars – in the Babruisk colony, where Zmitser Palienka is currently serving his sentence, Belsat reports.

You can send him congratulations at the address:

Zmitser Palienka, 212800, penal colony #2, Sikorski Street,1, 9th Detachment, Babruisk, Belarus.

On April 7, as the human rights center "Viasna" recalls, the Zavadski district court in Minsk canceled the delay in the execution of the sentence, which the Tsentralny District Court of Minsk imposed on the activist Zmitser Palienka in October 2016.

We remind that Zmitser Palienka was detained during the “Critical Mass” cyclists’ protest rally on 29 April, 2016. Thus, taking into account the time spent in pre-trial detention in 2016, the activist served one and a half years in prison.

The human rights community of Belarus concluded that Zmitser Palienka was arrested for the implementation of the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and expression of opinion, and qualifies the social activist as a political prisoner, demanding that the authorities should immediately release him.

As Charter97.org recently wrote, Zmitser faced a special attitude in the colony – in a letter to his friend, he wrote about a "yellow tag of an extremist", which the political prisoner was forced to attach to his clothes.