Prominent Belarusian human rights activist Ales Belyatsky was sentenced to 4.5 years in prison over tax evasion on Thursday, with his property ordered to be confiscated.
Belyatsky, the head of the Vyasna human rights center known for its criticism of the authorities, is convicted of failing to pay taxes from 567,000 euros (some $764,000) transferred by unidentified individuals to his foreign accounts.
The 49-year-old activist was arrested in early August after the Belarusian authorities learned about the accounts from their Lithuanian and Polish colleagues. He has denied all charges brought against him as politically motivated, saying he was only spending the money from his foreign accounts on Vesna center’s activities.
Belyatsky was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize several times and received a number of international awards for his human rights activities.
Prosecutor Vladimir Saikovsky on Wednesday demanded that the activist be jailed for five years in a high-security prison and his property be seized.
Belyatsky has also been ordered to pay a fine of 721 million Belarusian rubles (some $83,000) to the state.
In his last plea on Wednesday, the activist accused the Belarusian secret service, the KGB, of “deliberately working against rights activists, using all methods to intimidate them” and said he felt like he was “crying in the wilderness,” in reference to John the Baptist in the Book of Isiah
Prosecutor Saikovsky denied the allegations on Wednesday that political motives were behind Belyatsky’s trial. “Opinions that Belyatsky’s prosecution is linked to his rights activities are just opinions and cannot be considered as evidence in the trial,” he said.
Belyatsky’s arrest sparked an angry reaction from the European Union, whose foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton called on the Belarusian authorities to immediately release the activist.
Since it was set up in 1996, the Vyasna center has provided legal aid to thousands of Belarusians who were fined or jailed over their critisizm of Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko’s authoritarian regime.
The EU and the United States have imposed sanctions on the Lukashenko regime over his crackdown on dissent. Hundreds of opposition activists, including former presidential candidates, were jailed in Belarus following the December 2010 presidential elections that the opposition claimed were rigged.
