A court in Belarus convicted a prominent human rights activist on Tuesday of “inciting social hatred” for her work documenting alleged police abuses against political opposition groups.
The Minsk city court sentenced Nasta Loika, 34 to seven years in prison.
She called the charges trumped up and said during her closed-door trial that police used an electroshock weapon on her during her arrest.
Loika, who has spent nine months in custody, also said that she was once kept in the prison yard for eight hours without warm clothes in freezing winter temperatures and became gravely ill.
She protested against her treatment to the United Nations, and the UN human rights watchdog demanded last week that Belarusian authorities ensure her access to independent medical care.
Loika’s prosecution came amid a relentless crackdown on dissent in Belarus, a Russian ally which President Alexander Lukashenko has led with an iron fist since 1994.
Viasna, a Belarusian human rights organisation, denounced Loika’s conviction and sentencing as a politically motivated punishment for her human rights activities and demanded her immediate release.
The organisation said the charges against Loika were based on a description of a police crackdown that was contained in a report she wrote.
Interpreting the law against inciting social hatred to apply in such a situation violated international legal standards, the human rights organisation said.
Viasna representative Pavel Sapelka said Loika “has passed through all the circles of hell like other Belarusian political prisoners”.
Belarus was swept by massive protests triggered by Mr Lukashenko’s August 2020 re-election in an presidential contest that was widely seen at home and in the West as fraudulent.
Authorities responded to demonstrations with a fierce crackdown that included more than 35,000 people arrested, thousands beaten by police while in custody and dozens of non-governmental organisations and independent media shut down.
Authorities have continued repressions against opposition activists, human rights defenders and journalists.
Viasna says Belarus now has 1,496 political prisoners.
Opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, who challenged Lukashenko in the 2020 election and was pressured to flee Belarus after the vote, was put on trial in absentia and given a 15-year sentence in March on charges of extremism, high treason and threatening state security.
Belarus’s supreme court rejected her appeal and upheld the verdict on Tuesday.
