ACI Prensa Staff, Jan 3, 2025 / 17:05 pm
Father Henrykh Akalatovich was sentenced on Dec. 30 in Belarus to 11 years in prison for “high treason,” a charge that President Alexander Lukashenko’s regime applies to political prisoners, a representative of a human rights organization reported.
The Viasna Human Rights Center stated on X that the 64-year-old Catholic priest has denied “all charges.”
Viasna noted that the priest had already suffered a heart attack and had undergone surgery for cancer before his arrest in November 2023. “He needs special care and treatment, but instead he has been thrown into harsh conditions on political charges,” the organization noted.
In a statement to the Associated Press, Viasna representative Pavel Sapelka said Akalatovich is the first Catholic priest since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 to be sentenced in Belarus “on criminal charges that are leveled against political prisoners.”
“The harsh sentence is intended to intimidate and silence hundreds of other priests ahead of January’s presidential election,” Sapelka said.
In December 2024, The Tablet cited a statement from the Belarusian Catholic bishops calling on priests to limit their media appearances.
“Clerics and religious must remember they are called to preach Christ’s teaching, not their own opinions and views, especially those that could cause confusion, scandal, or division … This includes abstaining from political statements and expressions,” the Tablet reported, quoting a statement from the bishops’ conference.
The AP reported that Akalatovich’s conviction “comes as Belarusian authorities have intensified their sweeping crackdown on dissent ahead of the Jan. 26 presidential election that is all but certain to give President Alexander Lukashenko a seventh term.”
Belarus declared independence from the Soviet Union in December 1991 and held its first free elections in 1994, which Lukashenko won.
However, the ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin has remained in power by imposing an authoritarian regime. According to Viasna, there are more than 1,200 political prisoners in Belarus.
Religious freedom in Belarus
According to the 2023 Report on Religious Freedom by the pontifical foundation Aid to the Church in Need (ACN), Lukashenko declares himself to be an “Orthodox atheist” and carries out authoritarian repression with “devastating consequences for civil society and human rights, including religious freedom.”
The ACN report notes that Catholics make up 10%-12% of the population and that groups “not within the Orthodox structures of the Belarusian Orthodox Church and Moscow Patriarchate” suffer restrictions such as, for example, “arbitrary work permission denials to clerics other than those Moscow Orthodox Patriarchate-related.”
The report recalls the pressure exerted against the then-archbishop of Minsk and Mogilev, Tadeusz Kondrusiewicz, for calling for an end to violence against protesters who claimed there was fraud in the 2020 elections that kept Lukashenko in power.
In addition, the report says, the regime monitors believers through the secret police and controls them through its Plenipotentiary for Religious and Ethnic Affairs. “Surveillance is extended to publications by censorship and internet publications by the penalization of users for content posted,” ACN notes.
“Most human rights, including religious freedom, are endangered due to the authoritarian nature of the government in Belarus,” the ACN report summarizes.
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This story was first published by ACI Prensa, CNA’s Spanish-language news partner. It has been translated and adapted by CNA.
