Mother of the political prisoner sent a complaint to the United Nations

• 27.05.2008, 9:16

The mother of convicted sole entrepreneur Syarhey Parsyukevich on Monday sent a complaint to the UN Human Rights Committee.

On April 23, Mr. Parsyukevich was sentenced to 2 ½ years in a minimum security correctional institution, found guilty by Minsk’s Maskowski District Court of beating up a police officer.

As human rights defender Raman Kislyak told BelaPAN, the small business activist’s mother, Vera Parsyukevich, claimed in the complaint that the police had violated her son’s right to liberty and security under Article 9 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights whereby “anyone arrested or detained on a criminal charge shall be brought promptly before a judge.”

The woman insists that Mr. Parsyukevich should have been brought before a judge within 48 hours after his arrest.

In fact, he was arrested on March 4 and appeared before a judge only on April 22. “Thus, he was stripped of the right to a fair and impartial consideration of whether he should be arrested or released, which can only be done by the institution of judge,” Mr. Kislyak said.

Mr. Parsyukevich, a resident of Vitsyebsk, has been held in jail since March 4, when he arrived at the Maskowski District Prosecutor’s Office in Minsk for questioning on suspicion of violence against a police officer in connection with an incident that occurred when he was serving a 15-day jail sentence in Minsk over his participation in a protest staged by small business owners and sympathizers in the Belarusian capital on January 10.

Mr. Parsyukevich, a retired police major who chairs the Sole Entrepreneurs’ Council at Vitsyebsk’s Smalenski market, insists that he was brutally beaten on January 21 by Mr. Dulub, a warden in the rank of warrant officer in the detention center on Akrestsina Street.

However, Mr. Dulub said that it was he who had been attacked by the entrepreneur and the judge took sides with him.