Bulavinskaya is one of hundreds of journalists who went into exile after President Aleksandr Lukashenko intensified his jailing and persecution of the press following 2020 protests calling for his ouster. Increasingly, they face the long arm of the state. According to CPJ research, more than 60 journalists in exile are under investigation or facing criminal charges in cases that were opened after they left Belarus, constituting a massive campaign of transnational repression against those who continue to report from abroad.

Journalists are being charged under so-called “special proceedings,” a 2022 addition to the criminal procedure code that allows Belarusian authorities to convict people in absentia. At first, the proceedings were mostly used against dissidents, politicians, and activists; in 2024, authorities began charging journalists in an escalation against the exiled press, according to the Belarusian Association of Journalists (BAJ), a trade group operating from abroad since 2021. (Four of BAJ’s own employees face criminal cases according to the organization.)

CPJ spoke with 15 journalists facing criminal cases and found that the legal process typically follows the same pattern: Journalists learn that they are under investigation, or facing charges, when law enforcement officials pay intimidating visits to relatives still in Belarus or when they spot their names on Russia’s online database of wanted suspects, which since a 2010 regional treaty includes Belarusians. (Belarus’s own “wanted” database is not frequently updated.) Journalists’ remaining property in the country is seized pending a trial, which virtually always results in a conviction. The journalists are then sentenced and ordered to pay heavy fines, which serve as a pretext for the full confiscation of their property.

“Having repressed virtually everyone inside the country they could, the authorities have now turned their attention to those abroad,” said Barys Haretski, deputy head of BAJ, in an interview with CPJ. “The authorities have no intention of reducing the number of repressive acts; they want to keep not only those inside the country in fear, but also those who have been forced to emigrate.”

Journalists have little recourse once placed under “special proceedings,” which are nontransparent by design. According to BAJ, journalists are typically unaware of what might have triggered the criminal cases against them until the trial begins. (Bulavinskaya, for example, still does not know the nature of the investigation or any charges against her.) Journalists are represented by government-appointment lawyers who virtually never communicate with them. If they are sentenced to prison, such as three of the 15 CPJ spoke with, they can technically appeal, but it’s practically impossible as most never see a sentencing document, said Haretski. Once sentenced, they have to be extremely cautious about travel. If they enter a country with an extradition treaty with Russia or Belarus, they can be deported to serve their jail time.

CPJ emailed the Belarusian Investigative Committee, the agency in charge of pretrial proceedings, requesting comment on the use of “special proceedings” against journalists but received no response.

Journalism equated with extremism

Journalists facing “special proceedings” are typically charged with extremism. Since Belarus tightened its extremism laws in 2021 in response to nationwide protests, authorities have been steadily using them to erode press freedom by fining and imprisoning independent journalists and blocking outlets labeled as “extremist.”

Freelance journalist Zmitser Lupach, who is in exile in Poland, learned that he was charged with “promoting” extremism, among other criminal charges when acquaintances sent him a photo of himself in a display of accused criminals in Belarus’ northwestern city of Hlybokaye. Later, authorities seized his apartment and a police officer paid a visit to his 81-year-old mother to ask if Lupach was planning to come back to Belarus.

“I can’t imagine how one can equate journalistic work with extremist activity… I cannot explain it by anything other than revenge on the part of the Lukashenko regime,” he told CPJ. “It is impossible to keep silent about this. Because the state, which should protect its citizens regardless of their political beliefs, is behaving like the ultimate criminal.”

Another journalist in exile, Tanya Korovenkova, is facing a criminal case that she suspects is related to her previous work for independent news website Pozirk, which the Interior Ministry declared an “extremist” formation in December. The ministry also published a list of people affiliated with Pozirk that included her name, she told CPJ.

Her property was seized in October. In February, Belarusian KGB officers asked Korovenkova’s relatives about her activities. “I regard such actions against me, as well as against my other journalist colleagues, as persecution for our work,” she said.  

Families impacted

Journalists told CPJ that family members in Belarus are harassed, with sometimes devastating consequences. In December 2023, Iryna Charniauka’s 74-year-old mother was summoned for questioning about her daughter by the Belarusian Investigative Committee; months later, law enforcement officers visited the elderly woman’s home to inform her that the journalist was charged with promoting extremist activity over a July 2023 interview she gave to Belsat TV about the conviction of her husband, journalist Pavel Mazheika. Soon after, Charniauka’s property was seized.

“My mother is an old person, and she ended up in the hospital due to a heart attack and this is the direct consequence of all those things,” Charniauka told CPJ.

She said the legal process has been a black box.

“It is likely that a lawyer was assigned to me, but I don’t know who and I don’t know how to find out. When my colleague journalists had such special proceedings [opened against them], they found out that their government-assigned lawyers admitted their guilt… I cannot go back to Belarus, because I know what will be next,” she said.

Siarhei Skulavets, a former journalist with Belsat TV who is facing an extremism case, told CPJ that in 2024 officers twice searched the homes of his 64-year-old mother and his 85-year-old grandmother.

“Two weeks after the second search, which took place on December 31, my grandmother died. The cause of death was a heart attack. I believe that the law enforcement is indirectly to blame for this, as they inflicted severe trauma on her,” he said, adding that the home he left behind in 2023 was also searched.

“The authorities are waging a war against free speech in the country. Journalists who have not [left the country] are in jail. Law enforcement officers in turn have lost their conscience and are conducting an all-out sweep, destroying people’s lives, their destinies and families,” he said.

Self-censorship in exile

Exiled journalists told CPJ they made the difficult choice to leave in part to continue in the profession, but the use of “special proceedings” has forced them to question the safety of their work.

“Special proceedings and repression against relatives in Belarus are a crucial factor in why the vast majority of independent journalists in exile work anonymously and often refuse to work on camera in order to maintain their anonymity,” Haretski told CPJ.

“Close people with whom I had contact asked me to stop communicating with them,” another journalist facing criminal proceedings told CPJ under condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal. “They were very afraid of hurting me and themselves of course [by maintaining communication]. They were induced several times to ‘cooperate,’ in other words, to find out information from me and pass it on to the authorities. …This is a powerful lever of pressure, and of course it hurts a lot, but I hope that it is temporary,” she said.

“I would really like to continue to stay in the profession. But unfortunately, all the things I have built up, year after year, have been taken away from me,” she said.

Another journalist told CPJ under condition of anonymity that law enforcement came to his parents’ workplace before he realized he was on Russia’s wanted list. The journalist said “special proceedings” have succeeded in making exiled journalists think twice about continuing to cover the country they left behind.

“This is repression of journalists, an attempt to stop their activity,” he told CPJ. “And it does work – journalists go into self-censorship mode.”

The long arm of the state: Three exiled journalists facing criminal cases

Olga Loiko, a former editor of now-shuttered news website Tut.by, was sentenced in absentia this year on charges of inciting hatred, tax evasion, organizing a protest, and calling for sanctions. She has not been able to determine the exact sentence.  

“There is no doubt that I and the rest of the Tut.by staff are being persecuted for our journalistic work, for our exceptionally accurate and professional coverage of the events on the eve of and after the 2020 presidential election,” she said. “And the brutality of the persecution … is exclusively because of Lukashenko’s personal trauma, who believes that the West ordered [the protests], paid journalists and opponents, spies, etcetera, because otherwise he would have to believe that Belarusians hate him — and quite massively. And journalists are not the reason, nor the instigators of this hatred.”

Uladzimir Khilmanovich, a freelance journalist and human rights activist, was sentenced last August to five years in prison and a fine of 40,000 Belarusian rubles (US$12,224) on extremism charges. In January, court bailiffs confiscated his TV, washing machine, and refrigerator, and he anticipates that all of his property, including other household appliances, a rural plot of land, and a two-room apartment, will eventually be confiscated.

“The whole judicial system in today’s Belarus is built exclusively on repressiveness and persecution on political grounds for dissent,” he said.

Fyodar Pauluchenka, editor-in-chief of Reform.news, learned he was placed on Russia’s wanted list in March, about six months after his parents and daughter were summoned for interrogation by the Belarusian KGB.

“The authorities are trying to put pressure through my parents on me for my professional activities… They were forced to sign a non-disclosure document, and I cannot find out the details. They are scared,” he said. “This is a common practice of pressure on Belarusian journalists. Fortunately, I don’t have any property in Belarus, otherwise it would be confiscated.”

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Anna Brakha.

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Ruby Bridges challenged US segregation in 1960.

This week on CounterSpin: You can say someone ‘supports the rights’ of people of color to vote, or to have our experience and history recognized—as though that were a passive descriptor; she ‘supports the rights’ of people of color to be seen and heard. The website of the Kairos Democracy Project has a quote from John Lewis, reminding us: “Democracy is not a state. It is an act.”

Tanya Clay House is board chair at Kairos and a longtime advocate for the multiracial democracy that the Trump White House seeks to denounce and derail—in part by erasing the history of Black people in this country. As part of that, she’s part of an ongoing project called Freedom to Learn and its present campaign, called #HandsOffOurHistory. We hear from Tanya Clay House about that work this week.

Code Pink’s Medea Benjamin

Also on the show:  Corporate news media evince lofty principles about the First Amendment, but when people actually use it, the response is more telling. When USA Today covered activism in Seattle around the WTO, it reported: “Little noticed by the public, the upcoming World Trade Organization summit has energized protesters around the world.” You see how that works: If you’re the little-noticing “public,” you’re cool; but if you band together with other people and speak out, well, now you’re a “protester,” and that’s different—and marginal. Whatever they say in their Martin Luther King Day editorials, elite media’s day-to-day message is: ‘Normal people don’t protest.’ In 2025, there’s an ominous addendum: ‘Or else.’

Danaka Katovich is co-director of the feminist grassroots anti-war organization CODEPINK, currently but not for the first time at the sharp end of state efforts to silence activists and activism. We hear from her this week.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

Almost six months into Israel’s assault, Gaza’s health sector has been completely decimated. Before October 7, Gaza had 36 hospitals. Now only two are minimally functional, and 10 are partially functional, according to the United Nations. The rest have shut down completely after either being shelled, besieged and raided by Israeli troops, or running out of fuel and medicine. Israel’s assault has killed over 32,500 Palestinians, including over 14,000 children, and wounded nearly 75,000. We speak with Dr. Tanya Haj-Hassan, a pediatric intensive care physician who just spent two weeks volunteering and living at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Gaza, about what she witnessed and the conditions of healthcare in the beleaguered and devastated territory. “This is not a humanitarian crisis. This is the worst of what humanity is capable of, and it’s entirely all man-made,” says Haj-Hassan. “This is an utter and complete failure of humanity, and, to be frank, I feel ashamed to be an American citizen. I feel ashamed to be part of a society that has allowed this to continue.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

I used to have everything very separate. When I started doing community activism I felt like it was something that was right to do and something my whole life had led up to, because of feeling a massive amount of privilege for being able to cross the border every day when growing up in Tijuana. So it was something I did for my soul’s sake.

The work that’s more fine arts and design based, I did as a way to control the chaos in the world.</span> It was kind of a weird OCD therapy—a way of exercising the structure that school gave me. Growing up as a child of an alcoholic, a lot of us have really intense ways of controlling what we can through over-excelling. The art and design stuff was my way of squaring everything off. So I always had really defined outlets of art. They’ve been kept separate for my own sanity but have intertwined at different points in my life based on the political climate, the region I’m living in, and whatever’s going on in the world.

If somebody’s looking for an outlet to get involved in community activism but doesn’t know where to start, what kind of advice do you give?

There is a lot of tokenism that happens with anybody who is of a different class or has a different level of privilege and goes in to work with communities. Everybody has a public practice now. I think that going in like, “It’s something I think I should do,” complicates things and sometimes makes it so that people actually hurt communities more than help. So I would say that people should only get involved in helping community outside of themselves if it grows naturally out of their heart. It makes for a really unbalanced relationship if you don’t go delving into something you already love. Simple, small things that don’t feel like they have a lot of pressure to change the world is a good place to start.

Aguiniga Reindigenizing the Self Installation view Image courtesy of the artist and Volume Gallery, Chicago.

Can you exploit the desire of corporate entities, even if they’re coming from a place of tokenism, to do something positive with their funding?

Sadly I think a lot of us find ourselves in those situations and have to work out of financial need. So a lot of times, at least in our studio, we’ll have to take on a job with someone that maybe we don’t want to work with, really large brands or things like that. When we go into situations like that, we have a set of things we run through to make sure we’re not being taken advantage of. So that in the end, “selling out” for money doesn’t actually eat away at the studio—our mental health, our bodies’ abilities to deal with whatever trigger that client might’ve brought up.

Before we even get into working with anybody, we’ll talk to them about how open they are to true collaboration, because a lot of times I think large companies like to use us as tokens. It’s not just like, “I’m paying you to do this so you should just be happy to do it,” but it’s banking on your creative and cultural capital, which actually has a lot of value. So I think those situations need to be worked through so that you get to a place where you kind of level out the playing field and they get to understand that you actually have a lot of equity to bring to the conversation. Then we’ll work out ways where we become kind of agitators or instigators for good. When we look at what they’ve done before and it looks like they were being respectful or pushed the envelope to benefit a large number of people, that’s usually when we’ll start a conversation with them. Once we know what their intention is, we quickly move on to what we are allowed to do. What are the expectations and budgets? If one of those fall out, then we don’t do it.

You mentioned there’s a lot of authentic value in artists. Sometimes it’s hard for the artists themselves to feel that value if they’re looking at their bank statements. Is there any encouragement you like to give to young artists, a way for them to step back and understand their value?

People constantly think that I’m doing really well financially because I have so many exhibitions. But the art field is skewed in a really weird way where it doesn’t really take care of its own. It doesn’t account for the artist as a person. What’s valued are the objects, because that’s related to a commodity. And so I think understanding that it’s an ebb and flow is important, and that you have to have really amazing support from your community, friends, and family, so that you’re never alone. Make sure that you vocalize and ask your community for help. One of the greatest strengths I’ve learned over the years is the power of vulnerability and just being straight up honest about the realities of trying to make it as a person that didn’t come from money and doesn’t have money. Nobody’s going through that stuff alone. It happens to all of us regardless of how the public perceives our success. A lot of times I think we judge success based on finances, but success is really happiness and that doesn’t necessarily correlate with finances.

ShagCurves Image courtesy of the artist

There’s opportunity everywhere. It just kind of depends on knowing how to scale our needs to what we can actually access. I was doing a residency in Alaska and a lot of the traditional and native artists are really amazing at using every single part of everything that’s around naturally. I think there’s a lot of incredible innovation that comes out of need.

My use of material originally came from wanting to work with working class things that didn’t alienate my own family. I wanted to make things that could be understood, if it wasn’t in the conceptual way that I intended, then for the beauty of a material on a deeper generational level. So I tend to work with a lot of cotton and wool, because we’re constantly sheathed in these materials. It’s the things we grew up with, and what you got brought home in from the hospital.

For generations, people had to learn how to cultivate stuff, how to work it, how to figure out the different structures to make something stretchy, to make something stiff, to make something waterproof. There’s so many different things that I know our hands still remember. And so for me, a lot of it is just kind of tapping into weird magnetism of these really old-school ways of working that feel like they allow me in my studio practice and in my community-based work to kind of deconstruct hierarchies and talk to people about the magic of the stuff that is already inside of us.

You have a very close-knit studio. When you’re bringing someone into the fold, is there an important first step to get them into the DNA of the practice?

We just have to kind of vibe with the person and see some type of connection. We realized the studio works a lot better in terms of a weird symbiosis and melding of minds and hands when we don’t have straight men. Or, if a male or male-presenting person comes into the fold, they have to be incredibly feminist and empathetic. We’re really careful about allowing in any type of aggressive person because we do a lot of talking about our bodies and what women’s bodies go through. We do a lot of talking about problems in society that are related to patriarchy and a lot of real political talk that’s all about fighting for the rights of people of color, people that are indigenous, immigrants, people that are aging. We think a lot about everybody that’s been allowed to fall through the cracks for too long, and how we empower our brothers and sisters that are in those situations. So usually if a dude is not down with any of that, or if a dude gets grossed out by menstruation or something, that’s not a good fit for us.

How important is that constructive dialogue with your fellow artists to the actual final product?

I guess it depends on what the project is, because for some of them, we just kind of riff off each other—we’re just focused on each other, we’re not looking down at the thing that our hand is making. If we’re talking about something that we’re really heated about, then things will come up tighter. And if we’re talking about things that have to do with femininity or lactating or whatever, then a lot of times those things will come into the piece and we’ll end up with something that has a bunch of abstract boobs. And so, all of that stuff does always come in. It really informs the direction of the pieces a lot. We’ll be talking about intergenerational trauma and we’ll suddenly want to be ripping pieces so that you have gaping holes. So there’s a lot of stuff that comes into it that I think a lot of people kind of look past, at least in the fiber work, just because if it disguises itself as beautiful, then nobody thinks about the pain that went into it.

With the AMBOS Project, the relationship we were building with each other and the discoveries we were making within ourselves while being together—sometimes that feels more important than the physical work that we output, because I think it was such an intense, traumatic thing for a bunch of people, the same people, to go on for three years in a row.

Felt Folding Chairs Image courtesy of the artist

Can you explain what AMBOS is?

AMBOS stands for Art Made Between Opposite Sides. I founded the project in 2016 during the pre-election and started with activating the San Diego-Tijuana San Ysidro border crossing, and focusing on transnationals, the people that crossed the border every day to work, study, or shop in the US, which was what my family did. I crossed everyday for 14 years, my parents for over 40. My parents did it to go to work. I did it to go to school. A lot of issues in my life and in my parents’ life have been caused by making that commute every day.

And so originally, I wanted to focus on the transnational community and have this really amazing experience where for a month we had different artists come and collaborate with us from San Diego, Tijuana, and LA to talk about the rift between Chicanos, Mexican-Americans, and Mexicans, within the context of transnationality and the US and Mexico relationship where it converges at the border. And then after the first year, I had done a project called the Border Quipu where we gave every person that congregated at the border a postcard with two strings on it that said, “These two strings represent the relationship between the US and Mexico, our two selves at either side of the border and our mental state while crossing,” and it said, “Please make a knot.” And then on the back of it we asked people to write down a brief reflection of their thoughts on crossing the border or living at the border or being at the border.

After that, we realized the power of that project and got funding. It took us three years to complete the entirety of the US-Mexico border, traveling from Tijuana all the way to Brownsville and Matamoros. There was a core group of us that are educators, community activists, performance artists, documentarians, and photographers. We all would ride in this van together and zigzag and go to every single international border crossing between the US and Mexico, every single little town, and meet with artists at each of the sister cities—at every place that straddles the US-Mexico border through a port of entry—and talk to people about their main concerns in regards to the border. What artwork is made in each of those cities, how does it connect or not connect to the border, do they have any dialogue between their town and the town across the border?

So it was a lot of really deep, honest, painful conversations. In Arizona, there were a lot of white people that had never crossed the border, never taken the time to have interactions with people from the other side, yet made work about immigration or about the border. There’s a lot of nuances that happen over 2,500 miles of crazily changing terrain, going from ocean to desert to subtropical.

The first year on the road, there were seven of us. The second year there were eight. Everybody that comes along is also dealing with bi-nationality or the border. All of these people are exploring their own really deep identity to a place or a culture, whether it be the US and Mexico or a border or migration.

Someone in our group who’s a performance artist, she didn’t tell us before she became part of the group that she had actually walked to the US from Guatemala, when she was 17, and had attempted to cross on her own four times undocumented. And so it wasn’t until we got to the point where she had attempted to cross that a lot of stories and emotions and trauma and realization about all of these things that she hadn’t spoken to anybody about started to come out. So we all have really deep, complex connections to this subject. So yeah, it was a really weird journey. It was a lot of expanding our consciousness about what borders are.

Craft&Care-MAD-NY1 Photo by Jenna Bascom. Image courtesy of Museum of Arts and Design, New York

It seems that your work as an artist is therapeutic for yourself, your collaborators, and for the audiences engaging with it. Is there something you would like to share about this power of art?

Allow yourself to be vulnerable. Let other people into your journey. Try as much as possible while you’re making art to not judge yourself. I think that is really important. The sad thing is that with art there’s so many incredible things that we can do, in terms of helping ourselves psychologically, but once you put a price on it or show it to other people, it kind of moves into this different realm where I think a lot of our insecurities and anxieties start to come in.

So I think just remembering things are subjective, everything is an opinion, nothing is a truth, other than “this is made of canvas, this is made of ceramic.” We need to, as much as possible, not let people who say something negative keep us from continuing our exploration. Learn to let go a little bit and just do stuff for yourself. I think if you do stuff that you like, that’s when you get the farthest.

Chromatic 1, detail Courtesy of the artist and Volume Gallery, Chicago

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Mark "Frosty" Mcneill.

All three have denied the charges, and Leushyna and Navazhylau plan to appeal the verdict, according to former BelaPAN correspondent Tanya Korovenkova, who spoke to CPJ via messaging app. CPJ was unable to verify whether Aliaksandrau intends to appeal.

BelaPAN covered the nationwide 2020 protests demanding President Aleksandr Lukashenko resign, as CPJ has documented. On November 1, 2021, the State Security Committee of Belarus declared BelaPAN an extremist group, media reported.

“CPJ is alarmed by today’s sentencing of three BelaPAN journalists in a politically motivated case and denounces the witch hunt against the country’s leading independent news agency,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator, in New York. “Belarusian authorities must immediately release Andrei Aliaksandrau, Dzmitry Navazhylau, Iryna Leushyna, and all other imprisoned members of the press, and let the media work freely.”

On Thursday, October 6, a court in Minsk, the capital, convicted Aliaksandrau, founder and chief editor of the news website Belaruski Zhurnal and former deputy director of the independent news agency BelaPAN, of high treason, creating an extremist group, large-scale tax evasion, and “organizing or participating in gross violations of public order,” those reports said.

The court sentenced him to 14 years in prison and fined him 32,000 Belarusian rubles (US$12,600). Aliaksandrau has been detained since January 12, 2021.

Former BelaPAN director Navazhylau was convicted of creating an extremist group and large-scale tax evasion, sentenced to 6 years in prison, and fined 22,400 Belarusian rubles (US$8,820), those reports said. He has been detained since August 18, 2021.

BelaPAN director and chief editor Leushyna was convicted of creating an extremist group and sentenced to 4 years in prison. She was detained on August 18, 2021.

The closed-door trial began on June 6, 2022, and was suspended for two months in June and nearly two weeks in September, according to reports by the Belarusian Association of Journalists (BAJ), a banned local advocacy and trade group. Due to the secrecy of the procedure, the penalties requested by the state prosecutor were not disclosed before the verdict, BAJ reported.

Belarus was the world’s fifth-worst jailer of journalists, with at least 19 journalists behind bars on December 1, 2021, when CPJ published its most recent prison census.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

All three have denied the charges, and Leushyna and Navazhylau plan to appeal the verdict, according to former BelaPAN correspondent Tanya Korovenkova, who spoke to CPJ via messaging app. CPJ was unable to verify whether Aliaksandrau intends to appeal.

BelaPAN covered the nationwide 2020 protests demanding President Aleksandr Lukashenko resign, as CPJ has documented. On November 1, 2021, the State Security Committee of Belarus declared BelaPAN an extremist group, media reported.

“CPJ is alarmed by today’s sentencing of three BelaPAN journalists in a politically motivated case and denounces the witch hunt against the country’s leading independent news agency,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator, in New York. “Belarusian authorities must immediately release Andrei Aliaksandrau, Dzmitry Navazhylau, Iryna Leushyna, and all other imprisoned members of the press, and let the media work freely.”

On Thursday, October 6, a court in Minsk, the capital, convicted Aliaksandrau, founder and chief editor of the news website Belaruski Zhurnal and former deputy director of the independent news agency BelaPAN, of high treason, creating an extremist group, large-scale tax evasion, and “organizing or participating in gross violations of public order,” those reports said.

The court sentenced him to 14 years in prison and fined him 32,000 Belarusian rubles (US$12,600). Aliaksandrau has been detained since January 12, 2021.

Former BelaPAN director Navazhylau was convicted of creating an extremist group and large-scale tax evasion, sentenced to 6 years in prison, and fined 22,400 Belarusian rubles (US$8,820), those reports said. He has been detained since August 18, 2021.

BelaPAN director and chief editor Leushyna was convicted of creating an extremist group and sentenced to 4 years in prison. She was detained on August 18, 2021.

The closed-door trial began on June 6, 2022, and was suspended for two months in June and nearly two weeks in September, according to reports by the Belarusian Association of Journalists (BAJ), a banned local advocacy and trade group. Due to the secrecy of the procedure, the penalties requested by the state prosecutor were not disclosed before the verdict, BAJ reported.

Belarus was the world’s fifth-worst jailer of journalists, with at least 19 journalists behind bars on December 1, 2021, when CPJ published its most recent prison census.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.