Belarus to Leave UN Human Rights Body

Thursday, 6 October, 2022

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Viktoryia Kolchyna

Belarusian journalist and video-maker

Citizens of Belarus are at risk of losing their last legal mechanism to appeal against the state for human rights violations, with the government set to withdraw from a key UN treaty.

The First Optional Protocol of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) allows the UN human rights committee to receive and consider complaints from individuals.

Minsk’s decision is due by the end of the year, with President Alexander Lukashenko almost certain to approve the withdrawal.

“The committee is a treaty body, like the committee on the elimination of all forms of discrimination against women: their experts are entitled to act on petitions received from individuals, and issue decisions, which in principle oblige states to comply with the core convention individuals claim has been violated,” Anaïs Marin, UN special rapporteur on the human rights situation in Belarus since 2018, told IWPR.

Belarus has not recognised Marin’s mandate and does not allow her to enter the country.

"The current governance system seems to secure impunity for perpetrators.”

The 18-member committee is one of ten UN human rights treaty bodies, each responsible for overseeing the implementation of a particular agreement. It is a separate entity from the political, inter-governmental UN human rights council, which is a subsidiary of the UN general assembly.

Belarus became a party to the treaty on September 30, 1992. Since then, the committee has considered more than 100 individual complaints against Belarus.

Minsk is not a member of the Council of Europe (COE) nor a signatory of the European convention for the protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms, hence its citizens cannot appeal to the European Court of Human Rights, which is the COE’s flagship instrument. Once out of the protocol, Belarussians will not be able to turn to the committee as a last resort after failing to win in Belarussian courts on human rights issues ranging from arbitrary detention and torture to political killings.

Citizens would have no alternative mechanism, Marin noted.

“The UN special procedures ​mandate-holders, such as myself, or the working group on arbitrary detention, are experts with limited reporting prerogatives,” she stated.

EXPANSION OF POWERS

On August 17, Belarus’ council of ministers initiated the legislation to withdraw from ICCPR following a proposal from deputy foreign minister Igor Nazaruk, who criticised what he called the "arbitrary expansion” of the committee’s powers. 

“The UN committee's powers created additional unreasonable obligations on the Belarusian state, which it had not accepted when joining the protocol,” he said.

Experts note, however, that the withdrawal runs against​ article 61 of the constitution, as the state ratified the international covenant on civil and political rights. This foresees human rights obligations such as guaranteeing citizens’ access to justice.

“In reality, authorities completely consolidated the control of the judiciary and the court system to silence dissent​ers,” Marin explained. “The amending of the constitution [in February 2022] ​did not address concerns regarding the independence of justice​; the current governance system seems to secure impunity for perpetrators of repressions.”

Belarus has been ignoring UN human rights committee decisions for years, prioritising national laws over international ones. The committee has no mechanism for enforcing its resolutions, but it provides Belarusians with an independent legal assessment of their cases by impartial law experts with an international mandate.

“This mechanism made visible the real situation with politically embarrassing cases in Belarus and embarrassed the authorities, who were expected to report to the UN on the measures taken to restore justice. It should have come as no surprise that they finally refused to communicate and intensified the repressions,” said Pavel Sapelko, a lawyer at the Viasna centre, the country’s oldest human rights group. 

The co-founder of Viasna (Spring), Ales Bialiatski, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on October 7, alongside Russia's human rights organisation Memorial and Ukraine's Centre for Civil Liberties. Bialiatski was arrested in 2020 and has been in jail since, with no trial.

In a statement, human rights’ groups called on the Belarusian legislators not to pursue the withdrawal, warning that the Belarusian civil society would lose “one of the last remaining opportunities to seek justice for human rights violations in Belarus.”

“The UN committee has recognised most of the complaints filed by Belarusians as human rights violations and it has demanded the authorities take measures to restore justice,” human rights lawyer Natalia Matskevich told IWPR. Disbarred in 2021, Matskevich represented Viktar Babaryka, the former presidential contender arrested in 2020 on politically motivated charges.

Matskevich told IWPR that about 175 such decisions had been adopted so far, while 270 complaints are pending consideration.

 "The institution of justice in the country is long gone."

Babaryka, as well as other opposition figures like Andrei Sannikov, a candidate to the country’s 2010 presidential elections who lives in exile, and writer Vladimir Neklyaev, have turned to the committee to make their cases against the Belarusian government.

“Without an independent and competent judiciary, the position of any citizen becomes extremely vulnerable,” human rights lawyer Dmitri Laevski told IWPR. Like Matskevich, he has also been disbarred and represented Babaryka, whose appeal to the committee is currently under consideration.

Human rights lawyers say that the decision to leave the protocol may be related to the fact that among the pending cases at the committee are ​allegations of systematic torture in detention, that could amount to crimes against humanity.

If Lukashenko signs the withdrawal, the committee will continue ​to operate for three months, processing cases that had already been filed before the official decision.

“In 2021 the UN human rights council established another mandate on Belarus, for a team to examine violations that occurred in the context of the last contested elections,” Marin explained. “This accountability mechanism is meant to collect evidence of violations that could be brought to the attention of a tribunal - whether Belarusian, international, or foreign - when the time inevitably comes to prosecute perpetrators.”

THOUSANDS ARRESTED

The number of appeals to the UN Human Rights Committee has skyrocketed since the crackdown on government critics which followed the contested presidential elections of August 2020.

Thousands of Belarusians have been arrested. As of October 1, there are over 1,300 political prisoners, of whom 29 are journalists.

On October 6, the Minsk Regional Court sentenced three journalists from BelPAN, one of Belarus’ banned independent news agencies, to between four and 14yrs in jail. The three journalists - Andrei Aliaksandrau, Iryna Leushyna and Dzmitry Navazhylau - were charged with establishing an extremist formation, despite the fact that they had been behind bars long before BelPAN was banned on November 1, 2021. The court also sentenced Iryna Zlobina, a renowned sociologist, to nine years in prison. Rights groups state that all defendants are political prisoners.

Earlier, on September 14, investigative journalist Dzianis Ivashyn was sentenced to 13 years on charges of state treason after a closed-door trial. In a 2020 investigation, Ivashyn revealed that Russian riot police took part in the crackdown in Belarus.

Teresa Riberio, the OSCE representative on media freedom, called on the authorities to release Ivashyn and labeled the jailing of journalists “unacceptable and appalling,” adding that authorities should “stop prosecuting media workers as a deliberate way of sowing fear and silencing free voices”.

 In July, Belsat TV journalist Katsiaryna Andreeva was sentenced to eight years on charges of treason. She has investigated Belarusian participation in the armed conflict in eastern Ukraine and has reported widely on the 2020 uprising. Andreeva was already serving a a two-year prison sentence for organising an illegal protest and was due to be released in September.

Some experts note that, given the current dire situation, the withdrawal will not affect the national legal system.

“It is only an additional blow to the country's image,” said Oleg Gulak, chairman of the Belarusian Helsinki Committee, adding, “The UN human rights committee has never had a practical influence on legislative and judicial practice in Belarus. The institution of justice in the country is long gone. A totalitarian rule is being established.