Prison administration refuses to allow rights defender Byalyatski to be visited by wife
The administration of Correctional Institution No. 2 said that
it had found no grounds to overturn its decision to bar imprisoned human
rights defender Ales Byalyatski from receiving a conjugal visit.
In
his letter to the Belarusian Association of Journalists (BAJ), prison
chief Alyaksandr Kakunin said that Mr. Byalyatski had repeatedly
violated prison rules and had not contested the punishment imposed on
him.
The leader of a human rights group called Vyasna (Spring),
who is serving a four-and-a-half-year prison sentence in the
Babruysk-based facility, had been scheduled to be visited by his wife in
July but was barred from seeing the spouse as punishment for an
unspecified violation.
In addition, the 50-year-old Byalyatski was barred from receiving a food parcel.
Earlier
this month, the BAJ urged the prison administration to abolish the
punishment, describing it as pressure linked to Mr. Byalyatski's civic
stance.
Mr. Byalyatski, who has been vice president of the
International Federation for Human Rights, was arrested in Minsk on
August 4, 2011.
On November 24, 2011, he was sentenced to four
and a half years in prison on a charge of large-scale tax evasion. The
charge stemmed from information about his bank accounts abroad, which
was thoughtlessly provided by authorities in Lithuania and Poland under
interstate legal assistance agreements. During his trial, Mr. Byalyatski
insisted that the money transferred by various foundations to his bank
accounts abroad had been intended to finance Vyasna’s activities and
therefore could not be viewed as his income subject to taxation.