Activist sent from mental health center to detention facility – husband

July 6, BPN. Prison system officers are transferring activist Palina Šarenda-Panasiuk from a national mental health center to Minsk’s first detention facility on Vaładarskaha Street after psychiatric tests, her husband has said on Facebook.

Andrej Šarenda wrote that the transfer, weeks in police vans in the heat, might further undermine her health.

Šarenda-Panasiuk’s sentence is due to end on August 6, but the husband believes she will not be freed and will be re-sentenced. “In this way, Palina’s imprisonment becomes eternal,” he wrote.

In June 2021, a court in Brest sentenced Šarenda-Panasiuk, a European Belarus campaigner, to two years’ imprisonment for a scuffle with a police officer during a raid on her home, and for allegedly insulting police and the head of state. Ten months later, a court in Homiel sentenced her to an additional year for defying police orders.

In May, her husband said she was sent to an unknown medical facility for psychiatric examination. She filed an official request to renounce her citizenship in protest against torture, he said.

The family does not know the results of the examination or her current medical condition.

Human rights defenders have denounced the persecution of Palina Šarenda-Panasiuk as politically motivated.