Summer Postcard Action 2006
Belarus – Initiative Partnership Activists
As members of an unregistered organization called the Initiative Partnership, political activists Mikalay Astreyka, Enira Branizkaya, Alyaksandr Shalayka, and Tsimafey Dranchuk were preparing to monitor the presidential elections that took place in Belarus in March 2006. Weeks before the elections, KGB officers raided and searched the organization’s regional offices, then detained the four activists in the capital city, Minsk, on February 21, 2006. The four have been held since then in a KGB detention centre in Minsk. Authorities charged the four with acting in the name of an unregistered organization. The three men and one woman face possible maximum prison sentences of three years. If they are sentenced to prison, Amnesty International will consider them to be prisoners of conscience and will call for their immediate release.
Initiative Partnership Activists:Tsimafey Dranchuk
Mikalay Astreyka
Enira Branizkaya
Alyaksandr Shalayka
The Belarusian authorities are increasingly employing harassment, intimidation, excessive force, mass detentions and long-term imprisonment as methods to quash any civil or political dissent. President Alyaksandr Lukashenka, whose victory in the March elections was widely criticized by international observers as being the result of a process rife with irregularities, has imposed harsh restrictions on non-governmental organizations and increased control on all forms of opposition activity in his efforts to prevent a so-called "denim revolution," which is how the Belarus political opposition are characterizing their movement.
Please send cards of support to:
Tsimafey Dranchuk, Mikalay Astreyka, Enira Branizkaya, and Alyaksandr Shalayka
c/o KGB Detention Centre
Prospekt Nezavisimosti, 17
Minsk 220230
BELARUS