The organization Reporters Without Borders (RSF) urgently draws attention to the legal repression against the few journalists in Belarus who still report independently.
The imprisoned journalist Katerina Bakhvalova (pseudonym: Andreyeva) is currently on trial.
She worked for the Polish television channel "Belsat" and filmed a mass protest against the ruler Alexander Lukashenko in Minsk in 2020 with her colleague Darja Chultsova.
As a result, the two journalists were sentenced to two years in a labor camp.
Andreyeva was to be released this fall.
But now she is on trial again, this time facing 15 years in prison.
Her charge is treason.
It is unclear what exactly she is accused of, as Reporters Without Borders writes.
"The new trial against Katerina Andreyeva shows how far the Belarusian authorities are now going to take revenge for the independent reporting on the 2020 protests," says RSF Managing Director Christian Mihr.
The journalists should be released and the charges against Andreyeva dropped.
In June there were five more trials against journalists in Belarus.
One of the accused is journalist Irina Slavnikova.
She faces up to seven years in prison for allegedly leading an extremist formation and disrupting public order.
Slavnikova's website, her social media channels, as well as her former employer "Belsat" were classified as extremist by the Belarusian government in the summer of 2021.
Although the reporter was initially "only" sentenced to two fifteen-day prison terms, she was subsequently detained.
Oksana Kolb, editor-in-chief of the weekly Novy Chas, was convicted by a Minsk court on June 15 of "participating in acts grossly violating the social order."
Because she took part in a protest march in August 2020,