Court Decides Tonkacheva Will Be Deported
The Pershamayski district court of Minsk dismissed the appeal of human rights activist against the police’s decision to deport her and ban entry to Belarus for three years.
We remind that on November 5 the department on citizenship and migration annulled Elena Tonkacheva’s residence permit and ordered to leave the country within a month. The grounds for the decision were minor speed limit violations, registered by video cameras.
Elena Tonkacheva tries to dispute the decision in the chief police department of the Minsk City Executive Committee and then in court.
Elena Tonkacheva has lived in Belarus for 30 years. She runs the Legal Transformation Center (Lawtrend), an NGO dealing with freedom of association and freedom of assembly. She was among those who organized fact-finding work after December 19, 2010 crackdown on peaceful protesters and published research findings at the end. The organization also works on access to information for people with disabilities, and people’s access to information of state bodies. Lately, there have been several studies by the NGO on work of websites of Belarusian state bodies; monitoring of online rights, freedoms and latest developments in online sphere.
Judge Natallia Petukh considered the case in three hearings. The police insisted that Tonkacheva drove a car which is a source of increased danger, so, violating the speed limit, she created threat to public safety, might have caused injuries or deaths.
In her turn, Elena Tonkacheva assured she had never inflicted injuries to anyone that would cause damage to people’s health. She remarked that the law enforcement agencies did not present evidence that it was her who drove the car at the moments of violations; she presented proofs she had shared the car with her friend and a colleague. She also underlined that she had a daughter, of Belarusian citizenship, a job, and private property in Belarus, and nowhere else.
Before the trial, 7000 signatures were collected under electronic petitions not to expel her from the country (they were dismissed under the pretext they had not been submitted in a proper way; now the government is considering amendments to the law on online petitions, which, according to rumors, will ban such nuisance in future). There were also 700 written petitions in her defense.
Civil society representatives consider the authorities disproportionate and treat is as persecution for human rights activities.
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