‘I Tried To Find Out From Them, For What, Why? Nobody Answered’

A brutal detention happened in Rechytsa: the detainee was handcuffed, his clothes was pulled off.

On Christmas, December 25, Andrei Karbalevich with friends was waiting for a taxi near a private house in Rechytsa. One guy was held under his arms, for he was drunk. Instead of a taxi, a police car drove up to the company. To ensure the drunk guy will have no problems with the law-enforcement officers, the company decided to return to the yard. The police followed them, writes Belsat.

“I was standing at the gate, watching. They voiced some demands while talking,” says Andrei Karbalevich. “Then I moved closer to the fence.”

The law-enforcement officers did not have questions to our hero, so Andrei and two friends went home. They went to a stop across the courtyard, and dispersed on the highway ... When Andrei crossed the road, he noticed that a police car had approached his friends. Already when the man was sitting at the bus stop waiting for the bus, he heard that someone was running towards him.

“He [the policeman] grabbed my arm and jerked sharply. I hit my head against this [the structural part of the building]. And then they tried to twist my arms back,” Andrei recalls the events of that day.

The man was handcuffed, and his clothes were pulled off during detention. Our hero didn’t get home though: Andrei Karbalevich was detained for disobedience, punished with arrest, and fined for two base fees. Even during the detention, Andrei tried to prove to the police that they were violating his rights.

“I tried to find out from them: for what, why? But nobody answered me. They only smiled, and that’s all,” says Andrei.

Aleh Shabetnik, the owner of the house from where the company left that day, told the film crew that there were three video surveillance cameras installed on his house. He invited our correspondents together with Andrei Karbalevich to watch the video of that day.

“What is written in the [police] reports is radically different [from the video]. They fabricated the whole thing, despite the fact that they saw these records of the surveillance cameras,” says Aleh Shabetnik.

The video shows discrepancies with what was written in the police report.

“Well, the most interesting thing is that policeman Larchanka, who did not leave the yard for a second, wrote that you [A. Karbalevich] disobeyed the officers at a bus stop that is half a kilometer from here,” the house owner comments on the video record.

Aleh Shabetnik also said that after the detention of Andrei Karbalevich, he asked the police why he was detained. One of them answered that there was a woman at the bus stop whom Karbalevich had offended. However, there was no one else at the bus stop at the time of Andrei’s detention.

The correspondent wanted to find out from the police about the details of this case. But in the Rechytsa District Department of Internal Affairs we were sent to the press-center in Homel, and from there to the head of the Rechytsa District Department of the Investigatory Committee. It was not possible to contact him by work number. His colleagues on the phone said that he was not sitting still, and advised us to keep on calling.

On the day when our film crew arrived in Rechytsa, Andrei Karbalevich received a new court decision. The Rechytsa court dismissed the administrative offense of which the protagonist of our program was accused.

Valer Putitski from the Viasna human rights center is convinced that in cases of unlawful actions by police officers, one must assert one's rights.

“If you are sure that you are not guilty, that you have not committed any crime, then it’s you [A. Karbalevich] who should appeal to the regional court to challenge the verdict of the district court, write a complaint to the prosecutor, and you wrote to the Investigatory Committee. And they figured everything out, cancelled the decision of the district court. And now you are already completely innocent.”

In cases of unlawful detention, human rights activists advise:

-do not sign the protocol or be sure to add your comments;

-challenge the sentence in higher instances (regional court, Supreme Court);

-write complaints about the actions of policemen to the Prosecutor's Office, the Investigatory Committee;

-sue police officers for their actions, and demand compensation for non-pecuniary damage.