Ashmiany: hearing on the confiscation of personal belongings from Mikalai Ulasevich postponed to 25 July
On 16 July the Ashmiany
District Court was to have considered the lawsuit of Mikalai
Ulasevich, a civic activist from the Astravets district, concerning
the personal belongings which had been confiscated from him at the
border crossing "Katlouka" back on 10 April 2011.
Some
of them were destroyed after an examination held by the Hrodna
Regional KGB Department and the ideological department of the Hrodna
Regional Executive Committee, including two sents of educational
posters "Chernobyl lessons", published in Moscow, almost
twenty stickers "Fukushima" and "Born to NOT crawl"
and a brochure with an alternative report of the Belarusian NGOs on
the situation of human rights in 2010.
It should be noted that
this is the third round of litigation between Mikalai Ulasevich and
the Ashmiany customs office. The first one took place back in 2011,
when Judge Davydava of the Ashmiany District Court hastily reviewed
the case and made the decision to reject Ulasevich's claim because he
had allegedly missed the one-month term for passing the appeal
without a good excuse. The court ignored the fact that Mr. Ulasevich
made several attempts to solve the dispute with the customs office
without going to the court.
The second round of the litigation
ended in favor of Mikalai Ulasevich: the court rejected the lawsuit
of the customs office, which solicited for finding the confiscated
items as no one's property, as far as there was a dispute at the
court about the ownership of the seized items, some of which the
customs office refused to return.
The upcoming hearing will be
held to consider Ulasevich's claim to return to him his property, a
part of which was destroyed at the Astravets District KGB Department.
A peculiar moment is that the court has to summon to the trial the
defendants – representatives of the Hrodna Regional KGB Department
and the ideological department of the Hrodna Regional Executive
Committee, who held the examination and ruled that the items were to
be destroyed.
As it became known on 15 July, the hearing was
postponed to 25 July due to the general assembly of the judges of the
Hrodna region on 16 July.