A man in Belarus was sentenced to capital punishment, or death penalty, for aggravated murder by the Mahilioû Regional Court on 9 January, 2019.
Aliaksandr Asipovich was convicted of killing two women in his own house in July, 2018. He wounded one of the two victims up to 77 times, while the other victim had 16 wounds all over her body. Aliaksandr Asipovich apologized for what he had done, and argued: “I ask the court to give me an opportunity to save my life, work and pay money to the families of the victims”.
Asipovich will now go through the death penalty as he was sentenced and will suffer all the previous process to the execution. He will be held in complete isolation in his cell, without any walk outdoors and he will only be able to see his lawyers and relatives once a month.
Aliaksandr Asipovich will not know when he will be executed, so it could be any day for him. His family will not know this information either, so they could receive the news at any moment.
All the process of execution and the months before that moment are kept in secrecy by the state. However, a report done by Viasna, a local humanist group, argued in 2016 that the agents often used “torture and other cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment”.
Inmates are not allowed to sit on the bed outside the sleeping hours, a former prison worker told Viasna, and so they have to spend most of their days walking all around the cells.
On the execution day, the prisoners are told by a public prosecutor that their appeal for a presidential pardon has been rejected. The prisoners are blindfolded and they are taken to a specially-arranged room. They are then forced to their knees and shot with a gun.
Some weeks or months later, their relatives are informed about the executions. Sometimes, this happens when a box is sent to the families with some of his personal belongings. The bodies of the prisoners are never returned to the families and the locations where they have been buried remain as a state secret. This is considered by the United Nations a violation of the humans rights of the inmates and of their relatives.
DEATH PENALTY IN BELARUS
In the world, there are a total of 195 countries, out of which there are 56 that continue to have the capital punishment. The only country in Europe that has still got this punishment is Belarus. It is also the only European country to have carried out executions in the 21st century.
Belarus has carried out over 300 executions in the past 25 years, with only one pardon from the president.
However, the laws that regulate the capital punishment have changed all over the years. The most significant changes took place in the 1990’s, after Belarus had obtained its independence from the Soviet Union.
The Article 24 of the Constitution of Belarus states that:
“(...) the death sentence may be applied in accordance with the law as an exceptional penalty for especially grave crimes and only in accordance with the verdict of a court of law”.
Therefore, it can be applied in the following situations: conducting aggressive war (Article 122), terrorism (Article 126), genocide (Article 127), crimes against humanity (Article 128), murder committed under aggravating circumstances (Article 139), and conspiracy to seize state power (Article 357).
Valeria Kalinovich is from Belarus, and she has been living for three years in Spain. On this clip she can be heard talking in Spanish about the death penalty in Belarus.
The Administration of the Belarusian president has recently commented:
“Considering the death penalty as a rare punishment, Belarus is consistently taking steps to restrict its use”.