Belarus – Father Henryk Akałatowicz from a parish in Valozhin near Minsk in Belarus was detained as part of a treason case in mid-November. The 63-year old man has serious health problems. He is said to have recently undergone a heart attack. He has also had stomach surgery due to cancer.
On December 7, it was announced by the katolik.life website that he would remain in custody and that this means he has now been formally charged. In case of charges of treason, the Belarusian Criminal Code provides for a prison sentence of seven to fifteen years. According to katolik.life, the jail where he is being detained refused to accept warm clothing and food for him. In the first days after his detention, the Catholic priest could only be handed over hygiene items, underwear, and medicines.

Father Akałatowicz started his ministry in Soviet times, when he was secretly ordained. He was then fined several times, including in 1984 for visiting Katyn, the place of the mass murders committed by the Soviet NKVD against Polish officers in 1940.
After the Soviet Union fell apart and Belarus gained its independence, Father Akałatowicz was more than once the target of attacks by the new regime’s media for speaking Belarusian instead of Russian not only in church but also in the presbytery.
In 2013, another Catholic priest, Vladislav Lazar, was charged for treason and spent six months in KGB custody.

The Belarusian authorities suppress any public criticism of the Lukashenko regime and its support for Russia’s war against Ukraine. Courts have repeatedly convicted clergy members of various faiths. Aleksandr Lukashenko has been cracking down on the pro-democracy movement since the nationwide protests against the 2020 presidential election, considered rigged in his favour.
A number of activists have been sentenced to lengthy prison terms. The Viasna (Spring) Human Rights Centre currently reports 1513 political prisoners in Belarus.

The Polish minority has also been targeted as such along with the democratic opposition. In February, Poland began closing border crossings to lorries coming from Belarus after a court in Hrodna sentenced Andrzej Poczobut, a Belarusian journalist and active member of the Polish minority, to 8 years in a penal colony for incitement to hatred, calling for sanctions against Belarus, acting to the detriment of Belarus, and rehabilitation of Nazism.

In Belarus, the simple fact of mentioning the German–Soviet alliance of 1939–41 or showing in a positive light the Polish partisans’ struggle against the Soviet occupier and the communist regime after the Second World War is considered a rehabilitation or glorification of Nazism. Poczobut was sentenced for commemorating the “cursed soldiers”, that is, the anti-German Polish partisans who continued to fight after World War II until the 1950s, turning their weapons against the Communist regime and their Soviet masters.