Watchdog

MINSK -- A deputy director at Belarus's leading state-run news agency, BelTA, has been sentenced to five years in prison for sharing information with opposition groups as he looked to avoid repercussions for cooperating with the authorities when it appeared authoritarian ruler Alyaksandr Lukashenka would be pushed from power.

The Minsk-based Vyasna (Spring) human rights center said on April 19 that Judge Alyaksandr Vouk of the Soviet district court in the Belarusian capital sentenced Syarhey Adzyarykha on January 10 after finding him guilty of abuse of duty.

Details of the trial only became available now even though the Minsk City Court rejected Adzyarykha's appeal on March 15, which means that he will soon be taken to a penal colony to begin serving his term.

Investigators accused Adzyarykha of providing information to the opposition People's Anti-Crisis Leadership group and the Nik & Maik opposition Telegram channel in an attempt to distance himself from Lukashenka's regime amid mass protests following a disputed August 2020 election.

Months before the election, which Lukashenka claimed to win but opposition leaders said was rigged, Adzyarykha was awarded with a special prize from the president for his "high professionalism and personal contribution to the development of the state's information policy."

The court determined that he had abused his duty as a journalist by then leaking information to discredit Lukashenka and distance himself from the regime if and when it fell.

Hundreds of Belarusians have faced trials linked to the protests against Lukashenka over the results of the election, which handed him a sixth consecutive term.

Much of the opposition leadership has since been jailed or forced into exile. Several protesters have been killed and there have also been credible reports of torture during the widening security crackdown.

A court in Russia has sentenced Crimean Tatar activist Emil Ziyadinov to a lengthy prison term after convicting him of organizing activities of a banned Islamic group amid an ongoing crackdown on the ethnic group, which has been critical of Moscow's illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014.

Russia's Southern District Military Court in the city of Rostov-on-Don on April 19 sentenced Ziyadinov, a 37-year-old sports teacher at a school in Crimea, to 17 years in prison.

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His brother, Selim, told the human rights group Crimean Solidarity that the court ruled that Ziyadinov, who pleaded not guilty, must serve the first four years of his term incarcerated in a prison facility, with the rest of the term to be served in a maximum-security penal colony. Once the sentence is completed, he will be subject to parole-like restrictions for another 18 months.

Ziyadinov was arrested in July 2020 along with several other Crimean Tatar activists after their homes in Crimea were searched by Russia-imposed authorities. They were later charged with being members of the Hizb ut-Tahrir Islamic group that is banned in Russia but not in Ukraine.

The Moscow-based Memorial Human Rights Center has recognized Ziyadinov as a political prisoner.

Since Russia seized Crimea in 2014, Russian authorities have prosecuted dozens of Crimean Tatars for allegedly belonging to Hizb ut-Tahrir.

Last month, the same court sentenced seven Crimean Tatars on extremism charges that they and human rights organizations in Ukraine call politically motivated.

Moscow’s takeover of the peninsula was vocally opposed by many Crimean Tatars, who are a sizable minority in the region.

Exiled from their homeland to Central Asia by Soviet authorities under the dictatorship of Josef Stalin during World War II, many Crimean Tatars are very wary of Russia and Moscow's rule.

Rights groups and Western governments have denounced what they describe as a campaign of repression by the Russian-imposed authorities in Crimea, who are targeting members of the Turkic-speaking Crimean Tatar community and others who have spoken out against Moscow's takeover of the peninsula.

Russia took control of Crimea from Ukraine in March 2014 after sending in troops, seizing key facilities, and staging a referendum dismissed as illegal by at least 100 countries.