Minsk court convicts anti-nuclear campaigners

Minsk Tsentralny District Court has sentenced Irina Sukhiy, head of the NGO "Eco House", to a fine of BYR 1,500,000 on charges of disorderly conduct. Mikhail Matskevich, coordinator of the Monitoring Group of the Centre of Legal Transformation, has been arrested for three days on the same charges.

The activists were detained by Minsk police as they were going to pass an appeal to Russia’s Prime-Minister Dmitry Medvedev who is currently on a visit to Minsk.

The policemen who testified in court said the activists were swearing and swaying their hands.

The whereabouts of two more activists of a campaign against the construction of a nuclear power plant (Tatyana Novikova, coordinator of the campaign, and Russian nuclear physicist Andrei Ozharovsky) are yet unknown.