EU Ambassadors to Belarus visited photo exhibition of death penalty in Belarus

The joint protect of the photojournalist Siarhei Balai and the campaign "Human Rights Defenders Against Death penalty in Belarus" was presented on October 7 at the manor "Goliaths".

Heroes of the photo project "Capital Punishment" are Sviatlana Zhuk, Liubou Kavaliova, Tamara Seliun, Volha Hrunova and Tamara Chikunova – mothers whose sons' lives were taken by the state under the guise of anti-human law.

Opening of the exhibition was held with the participation of the author, Siarhei Balai, Tamara Chikunova (one of the heroines of the project, who became an abolitionist activist after the shooting of her son) and representatives of the campaign "Human Rights Defenders against Death Penalty in Belarus", Euroradio informs. Guests of honor became Karel Schwarzenberg, Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Parliament of the Czech Republic, and Milan Eckert, Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the Czech Republic in Belarus.

Speaking at the opening of the exhibition in the “Goliaths” gallery, the coordinator of the campaign “Human Rights Defenders Against the Death Penalty in Belarus” Andrei Paluda turned the attention of the present people to the main poster of the event: colored figures of two men – a victim and an executioner. "Today, opening the Week Against the Death Penalty, I want to say that it will be held under the slogan "Death Penalty Is Murder". In their letters death row convicts wrote that they have a habit to sculpt the figures of a victim and an executioner from bread. We decided to use this strong image and put it into a poster to show how psychologically difficult it was for the criminals condemned to death to wait for execution and how they become victims themselves. This is a thin temporary boundary, which is called the corridor of death, when they are really afraid of doors, because, as reported by a former head of the prison in Valadarski Street Aleh Alkayeu, the death comes in through them”.

As to the arguments against the death penalty, the representatives of the campaign "Human Rights Defenders Against the Death Penalty" mentioned they often hesitated which of them were the most important ones and finally decided to make videos telling about six of these arguments. 

As spring96.org points out, visitors of the exhibition had an opportunity to view the fourth film from the series “Six Arguments Against the Death Penalty”, telling about killings of political opponents and mass shootings.

At the end of the exhibition Andrei Paluda pointed that “human rights defenders will hold these traditional weeks until Belarus is freed from the death penalty” and called the people to visit the unique poster exhibition, held in Minsk on October 6-7.