Polish official says conditions not right to secure reporter Pačobut’s release

July 28, BPN. Warsaw made “every possible attempt” to secure the release of Andrej Pačobut (Andrzej Poczobut), said Polish Interior Minister Mariusz Kamiński. All attempts were unsuccessful and current conditions remain unfavorable, wnp.pl quoted him as saying.

The minister described Pačobut, a prominent journalist and Polish minority activist currently serving a lengthy prison term in Belarus, and other Belarusian political prisoners as “real Belarusians” and “the leaders of the Belarusian people.”

The journalist may be currently held in a punishment cell at Navapołack Penal Colony No 1, Viciebsk region, wnp.pl said citing his wife who has not received letters from him in the last three weeks. Pačobut is said to lack the necessary medicines and is not allowed to see his lawyer.

In February, a Belarusian court sentenced Pačobut to eight years in prison on charges widely seen as politically motivated. In response, Warsaw closed a major checkpoint at the Polish-Belarusian border making the reopening conditional on his release. However, it stopped short of closing all cross-border traffic with Belarus.

In May, Kamiński imposed sanctions on 365 Belarusians linked to the “draconian sentence” and ordered the freeze of the financial and economic assets in respect of 20 entities and 16 individuals mainly associated with Russian capital.

Poland targeted 159 members of the Belarusian National Assembly, 76 judges, seven prosecutors and 23 Belarusian propaganda figures. It also sanctioned 32 local officials, 28 law-enforcement officers, 24 athletes and sports activists, eight employees of institutions and state companies, and eight workers of culture and science.

Gazeta Wyborcza contributor Pačobut, also known as an activist of the unregistered Union of Poles in Belarus (UPB), has been in custody since March 2021.

He was arrested after masked police officers raided his home in Hrodna on March 25.

On the same day, the Prosecutor General’s Office announced that it had instituted criminal proceedings against UPB leader Andzelika Borys and “other individuals.”

It said that the criminal case had been opened under Part Three of the Criminal Code’s Article 130, which penalizes incitement to racial, ethnic, religious or other social hatred and “the rehabilitation of Nazism.”

“The individuals, positioning themselves as members of the above mentioned union, have organized and held a number of illegal mass events with the involvement of under-18-year-olds in the city of Hrodna and in other localities in the [Hrodna] region since 2018 with a view to honoring members of anti-Soviet gangs that were active during and after the [1941-1945] Great Patriotic War, committed robberies, murdered Belarus’ civilians, destroyed property. Their actions were aimed at rehabilitating Nazism and justifying the genocide of the Belarusian people,” the Prosecutor General’s Office charged.

Later, prosecutors also accused Pačobut of calling for sanctions.

Pačobut’s trial, which had been postponed several times, opened on January 16. On the same day, the judge ruled to close the proceedings to the public.

Last autumn, Pačobut refused to petition Alaksandr Łukašenka for pardon. The Committee for State Security (KGB) put him on the list of “persons involved in terrorist activities.”