Information agency "New Platform Innovation" ("Platform") appealed to the General Prosecutor's Office with a request to react to the facts of pressure, which, to the best of the organization's knowledge, are being rendered to the political prisoner Mikhail Zhamchuzhny by the administration of the colony No. 9 in Horki. This was announced at a press conference on August 15 in Minsk by the director of the Platform, Andrei Bondarenko.
"With respect to the Zhamchuzhny, cruel and inhuman treatment is now being applied," said the director of the Platform. – He has already twice visited the penalty cell. Formally – for refusing to comply with the lawful demand of the administration's employees, but in fact – for refusing to go to Detachment 13, where convicts are held with a so-called low or indefinite status ... Mikhail resisted and was eventually punished by a penalty Insulator".
"Empowering a convicted person with informal status is an element of pressure that is carried out, first of all, through prisoners who cooperate with the administration. A certain provocation is being committed, and in the future the convict must either ask for security measures to be applied to him, or exist in shameful conditions, perform the most humiliating and offensive work, and experience restrictions among other convicts," Bondarenko said.
The director of the Platform did not rule out that a criminal case could be instituted against Zhamchuzhny in accordance with Article 411 of the Criminal Code (malicious disobedience to the lawful requirements of the administration staff).
Bondarenko said that Platform together with colleagues intends to inform the representative office of the European Union in Belarus, the international human rights organization Amnesty International and the UN special rapporteur on the situation in Belarus, Miklos Haraszti, about the Zhamchuzhny situation and the problems of the Belarusian penitentiary system as a whole.
Mikhail Zhamchuzhny is a former associate professor at the Viciebsk State Technological University, Candidate of Technical Sciences, the author of several scientific monographs and developments, the inventor. The first in Belarus registered a self-made car with alternative fuel.
In July 2015, the Viciebsk Regional Court found Zhamchuzhny guilty of instigating the deliberate disclosure of information constituting official secrets, the illegal acquisition and sale of a special technical tool intended for secretly obtaining information, and giving bribes. The human rights activist was sentenced to six years in prison in a strict regime colony. The Judicial Board of Criminal Cases of the Supreme Court, having considered in October the same year a cassation appeal against the sentence, appointed him a more severe punishment – six and a half years imprisonment.
Belarusian human rights activists recognized Zhamchuzhny political prisoner.
Zhamchuzhny was kept in a colony in Navasady (Barysaŭ district of Minsk region), then in colony No. 11 in Vaŭkavysk (Hrodna region). On July 10 he was transferred to Horki.
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