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Four German lawyers have filed criminal charges against the authoritarian ruling President Alexander Lukashenko and Belarusian security officials on behalf of ten people from Belarus with the Federal Prosecutor General in Karlsruhe.
They accuse them of crimes against humanity, as a spokeswoman for the Attorney General confirmed on Wednesday upon request.
Initially, the "Spiegel" and the "Tagesspiegel" reported.
The lawyers said they were aware of more than a hundred cases of documented state torture in Belarus.
They had been expressly commissioned by ten torture victims to “represent all criminal charges to the Federal Public Prosecutor against the state-ordered and systematic torture in order to initiate investigations under German jurisdiction”.
They refer to the principle of world law, according to which international law crimes can also be prosecuted here if they were committed abroad and neither perpetrators nor victims are Germans.
In Belarus, the authorities reacted brutally to the peaceful protests after the presidential election in August, which was accompanied by massive allegations of fraud: Several demonstrators were killed and hundreds more sentenced to long prison terms.
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Her clients reported trivial arrests, torture and ill-treatment for the days of their detention, the lawyers said. They were locked up in narrow cells or vans and “physically abused, humiliated, threatened, insulted and otherwise degraded over several days”. All of them suffered serious damage to their health.