Valiantsin Stefanovich: It is strange to hear about “grave mistakes” in Bialiatski’s case

Deputy Chairman of the Human Rights Centre “Viasna” suggests Siarhei Balykin to have a more thorough consideration of Ales Bialiatski’s case materials.

Let us recall that Siarhei Balykin in the interview with the EuroBelarus Information Service stated that fiscal authorities in Belarus have recently turned into a mechanism of repressions against civil activists. According to Balykin, “Belarusan civil society and human rights fighters are obviously unprepared for such a scenario. Human rights fighters do not understand the economic nature of these relations and prefer to confine to the international obligations Belarus has; which results in numerous grave mistakes they are making”. The lawyer has exemplified his point with Ales Bialiatski’s case.

- If we consider the lawyers’ statements made in court, the results of the case’ monitoring, it becomes clear that the defence and the head of “Viasna” Ales’ Bialiatski himself were referring not exclusively to the international proposition of law, which is stated by this expert, - noted in the interview with the EuroBelarus Information Service Valiantsin Stefanovich. – The lawyer and Ales’ Bialiatski were referring to the national legislation, on the Tax Code in particular, saying that this case isn’t liable to taxes. According to the code, the citizen has to submit the income declaration only if it has an income which is subject to taxation. However, in this case there is no saying it was a taxable income, as the Code says that those sums of money were received according to the agreement with the correspondent funds for the transfer to the third parties. The fact that the court hasn’t found it legal and gave no assessment means this case is actually politically motivated, though the documents from the funds, which explained the nature of the money, were submitted. So I don’t think we can talk about the “grave mistakes” of the defence, which was actually represented by Dzmitry Loeuski, who specializes in economic cases.

Valiantsin Stefanovich also noted that “there are enough case materials at the “Viasna” webpage; I suggest that Siarhei Balykin reads them”.

- It should be known to Balykin that total damage which was supposedly inflicted by Ales Bialiatski has been doubled by the so-called indexation. There is no such notion in any law; however, both the fine and the indexation were recovered from Bialiatski, which almost tripled the initial amount of damage. Can we speak about purely economic case then? The comment is superfluous there, I think.