The tactics of the authorities is to file legal complaints against their opponents, without going into detail and disregarding the public response to the cases.

The Pieršamajski Regiona Court in Minsk on January 13 rejected to satisfy the appeal of Elena Tonkacheva, the Head of the Legal Transformation Center (Lawtrend), re the decision of her deportation from Belarus. Practically it means that this is the end of case, though of course, judicially there is a chance to appeal this decision in the judicial board in Minsk City Court, though it will hardly give positive results.

There are more than enough questions to the decision and arguments of the Pieršamajski Regiona Court.

“We didn’t hear the main answers to the questions that were in Tonkacheva’s appeal,” stated Aliaksei Kazliuk, the Lawtrend lawyer to the EuroBelarus Information Service. “Thus, for some reason the court thought that the opinion of the citizens was taken into consideration, though District Department of the Interior didn’t consider the appeals submitted by the citizens.

Likewise the court neither resolved the question of what is public order nor answered the question what threat Elena Tonkacheva poses.

In result, the main questions that concern proportionality, when the court had to find out whether some other punishment could be used against Tonkacheva, were left unanswered.”

Maryna Adamovich, the wife of the political prisoner Mikola Statkevich, who was present at court sessions, assumes that the decision taken by the court re Tonkacheva’s appeal doesn’t lie within the frames of law:

“The order of the authorities was fulfilled, and that was a completely wrong decision. The state proves one more time that it has no relation to law.”

— Unfortunately, we expected such court decision, — noted Ulad Vialichka, the Director General of the International Consortium “EuroBelarus” in the interview with the EuroBelarus Information Service. — Of course, during the consideration we had our romantic hopes that this time justice is possible, all the more that the one of the most professional lawyers in Belarus in the sphere of human rights advocacy was taking part in it.

But if even the professional provision of Elena Tonkacheva couldn’t affect the decision taken earlier, then principal doubts about the possibility of justice when it comes to civil law cases appear, especially when it comes to civil and politically active people.

— Why the factual background were studied so carefully in the court, but in result nothing was taken into consideration in favor of Tonkacheva?

— We can only make suppositions about it. One of the reasons might be the need to put the case as objectively considered. The longer the process lasts, the more professional and objective it seems. Besides, with such kind of considerations the quantity and quality of the considered material might give the judge extra material to justify the initially taken decisions.

— Is Tonkacheva’s deportation a single case when one particular person is persecuted or is it a signal of the start of a new wave of human rights defendants’ persecution, let’s say, before the president election?

— I am not inclined to think that the situation with Tonkacheva is a demonstration of some persecution wave; it is rather a new tactics of Belarusan authorities that comes from the preventive paradigm, when they use every excuse to direct it against those people who for some reason bother the authorities.

Tonkacheva’s case is not a wave of new repressions and isn’t at all linked with the president election. This is rather an occasion that was up the authorities’ sleeve and the authorities made use of it. We don’t have many politically active citizens with Russian citizenship in Belarus.