The prosecutor has demanded that Eduard Palchys (‘Jhon Silver’), a creator of 1863x.com political blog, spends 20 years behind bars, former political prisoner Pavel Sevyarynets says with reference to his own sources.
Palchys is being tried for ‘inciting racial, national or religious hatred’ and ‘distributing pornographic material’. Nine articles were recognised extremist. The charges are pointless and artificial, Belarusian human rights defenders say. According to them, Eduard Palchys is another political prisoner of Lukashenka’s regime.
His case is being heard behind closed doors, which attracted a storm of criticism. Reporters Without Borders (RSF) accused the Belarusian authorities of bringing baseless charges against the blogger and calls for his immediate and unconditional release.
Today, in spite of heavy raining, 14 persons came to voice their support to the blogger. The police drew up protocols on 12 of them.
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According to Silver, two criminal cases were brought against him in 2015 for his activities in the blog – for allegedly inciting ethnic strife (in particular, for the article ‘Kill the Russian World’) and spreading pornography.
The blogger decided to hide in Ukraine. All the while he lived in Kyiv, from where he continued to work on the blog. But when the blogger went to a meeting in Russia in January 2016, he was arrested and put in jail. At the beginning of 2016 Sputnik i Pogrom, an extreme right-wing Russian organization, reported that the real name of the ‘Russophobe from Belarus’ is Eduard Palchys. Then Palchys was transferred from Russia’s Bryansk jail to Belarus.
