According to Prosecutor General Andrei Shved, since 2020, the number of criminal cases open over “mockery” of the red and green flag has increased tenfold.
“While in recent years and until the middle of 2020, the cases of criminal mockery of the state symbols were isolated, by the end of the year, the number of such crimes increased to 50. In the first five months of this year, there were 53 of them. However, the principle of inevitability of responsibility works. To date, prosecutors have sent the courts criminal cases against 47 citizens,” said the head of the Prosecutor General’s Office in an interview to Belarus Today.
Shved added that during the investigation, the defendants in such cases “usually confessed and repented of their deeds, often publicly. “Among the reasons for such and other unlawful behavior, I will highlight emotional immaturity and lack of critical thinking under the influence of destructive information,” he noted. Since the summer of 2020, Article 370 (“mockery of state symbols”) of the Criminal Code has been actively used by special services to persecute dissenters. Usually, by “mockery” of state symbols, the security services mean the fact of someone removing the red-green flag from a building (even if it is a store or a nightclub). Some of the detainees in these cases are later made to apologize on video.
There are also absolutely absurd facts of using Article 370. For example, a music teacher in Minsk was punished with two years of freedom restriction at home for a political joke in the social networks: she changed the original text of the national anthem of the Republic of Belarus on her Twitter page. A case was brought against opera singer Marharyta Lyauchuk after she sang with the red-green flag in the music video #YABATSKA, where it falls to the ground, and in another – falls into the trash.
