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Yuri Garawski in front of the courthouse in Switzerland
Photo: Gian Ehrenzeller / EPO
In Switzerland, an ex-soldier from Belarus has been acquitted, who claims to have been involved in the kidnapping and murder of opposition members. The Rorschach District Court thus followed the defense counsel's request. She had demanded an acquittal on several formal grounds. The public prosecutor's office requested three years in prison in the trial last week, two of them on probation.
Yuri Garavsky himself had stated in his asylum application and in front of the media that he had been a member of a death squad that kidnapped and killed former Interior Minister Yuri Zakharenko, ex-head of the electoral commission Viktor Gonchar and businessman Anatoly Krassovsky in 1999 on behalf of the state. The ruler was then, as now, Alexander Lukashenko.
Officially, the fate of the disappeared is still unclear. Two of the men's daughters present at the trial had said they believed Garawski's statements.
Garavski had said that he had been recruited as a conscript in a Minsk military unit for the Belarusian special forces Sobr, whose official goal is to fight crime.
Crimes against humanity
The fact that the trial could take place in Switzerland is due to the so-called principle of universal jurisdiction. Accordingly, national criminal law also applies to certain serious crimes that were not committed on one's own territory or by or against one's own citizens. In this case, it was about enforced disappearances, sanctioned under international law as a crime against humanity.
Human rights activists had hoped for a conviction. This would be the first time that a court has indirectly found that the regime in Belarus is making opposition members disappear and kill.
til/dpa