Imprisoned ex-presidential candidate applies for safe confinement conditions: danger to life?
This act has been triggered by provocations which are becoming increasingly commonplace for Mikalai Statkevich. More provocations have been organised due to the deteriorating economic situation in the country and the authorities’ desire to force him to address to President Lukashenka and ask for pardon, Mr Statkevich believes.
His website does not reveal any further details.
‘As I see it, he had to throw the prison wards into a simple dilemma, i.e. it is only them, penitentiary officers, who will pay if anything should happen to him. They won’t be able to shift the responibility onto someone else, on a mischance. I don’t think it was an easy choice – he will have to spend the next year <…> in a solitary cell if there is no change. I am not ready to give any comments so far,’ his wife Maryna Adamovich said on her Facebook account.
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Mikalai Statkevich is the last 2010 presidential candidate to be in prison. The sentence given to Mr Statkevich in 2011 was one of the toughest: six years of imprisonment in a maximum security penal colony. The reason might be explained by the fact that in his election speech Mikalai Statkevich addressed to the current president demanding ‘to give back all that you have stolen’. The authorities are trying to embitter Statkevich’s life even in prison putting him to a disciplinary cell or making him share a ward with an AIDS sufferer. However, the former presidential candidate keeps mantaining his innocence and refuses to ask President Lukashenka for pardon.
