Supreme Court throws out journalist’s appeal against prison sentence

June 16, BPN. The Supreme Court in Minsk has rejected journalist Hienadź Mažejka’s appeal against sentence, the Belarusian Association of Journalists (BAJ) reports.

The supreme justice who issued the ruling, Uładzimir Čaravač, has never overruled lower courts’ decisions on “political” cases, the BAJ said.

Mažejka was arrested in October 2021, after he interviewed a classmate of an IT professional who died in a gunfight with KGB agents during a raid on his apartment.

Fierce propaganda criticism of the interview prompted Komsomolskaya Pravda v Belarusi, the newspaper that published it, to close down.

According to investigators, Mažejka wrote “negative, obscene and unacceptable” comments about Alaksandr Łukašenka on the Internet.

On March 23, Minsk City Court sentenced the journalist to three years in prison for inciting hatred and insulting the head of state.

Given that every day in custody counts as a day and a half in jail, he has a little over a year to serve, according to the BAJ.