Political prisoner Artsiom Dubski sentenced to one year in jail
Asipovichy district court sentenced Artsiom Dubski to one year of imprisonment. He was taken to prison right after from the court hall.
According to information of RFE/RL, the youth activist was found guilty of violating the regime of the personal restraint, to which he had been sentenced earlier.
The state accuser Lazarenka asked the court to punish Artsiom with one year of imprisonment, while his lawyer Tamara Sidarenka stated that it was the police officers of Asipovichy who made Artsiom leave Belarus by threats of criminal persecution. Their reports were in a mess, and they just used them when they wanted to, without an appropriate registration.
Mrs. Sidarenka also pointed that Artsiom has already served a half of his term and asked the court not to punish him with imprisonment. Nevertheless, the court took the side of the accusation and sentenced the activist to one year of imprisonment.
Bear in mind that earlier Mr. Dubski had been judged within the frames of the ‘process of 14’ and got two years of personal restraint without direction to an open penitentiary institution. Then he was accused under Article 415 of the Criminal Code – ‘violation of the regime of the punishment’, which envisages 6-36 months of jail as punishment.
In May the international human rights organization Amnesty International confessed Artsiom Dubski a prisoner of conscience and published an official note, where his surname is mentioned among the surnames of the 11 persons who had been sentenced to different terms of personal restraint within the frames of the ‘process of 14’ and in fact were kept under home arrest.
