‘Criminalisation’ of Belarus students, academics condemned

The European University Association (EUA), the European Students’ Union (ESU) and Scholars at Risk (SAR) have issued a joint statement condemning the “criminalisation” of students and academics in Belarus.

On 28 May they called on the Belarusian authorities to protect and promote academic freedom and related fundamental rights and urged European governments to support at-risk scholars and students from Belarus.

The call comes two weeks after trials began for 11 students and one professor from universities in Minsk who participated in peaceful protests in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential elections, and it comes in the wake of the 23 May forced diversion and landing of a Ryanair passenger plane (flight FR 4978 from Athens-Vilnius) in Minsk to detain a journalist and a student of the European Humanities University in exile.

The students and professor currently on trial were arrested in November 2020 and face criminal charges for “actions that grossly violate public order”, with potential prison sentences of up to two years.

Nine of the 11 students and the professor detained are women. They include:

• Yana Arabeika, an activist of Belarusian Students’ Association and a student of the Belarusian State Pedagogical University, who was detained in a dormitory on 12 November and is being held in a pre-trial detention centre.

• Alana Gebremariam, secretary of external affairs and member of the council of the Belarusian Students’ Association, activist of the Youth Bloc and core member of the Coordination Council, who is being held on remand for two months’ custody in a pre-trial detention centre.

• Volha Filatchankava, professor at the Belarusian State University of Informatics and Radioelectronics, also being held in a pre-trial detention centre.

The detainees have reportedly had little or no contact with their relatives since their arrest and the press has been excluded from the criminal trial, which began on 14 May and is expected to continue until mid-June.

The 12 on trial are among a growing number of university members who have been detained, expelled from their institutions and punished with exorbitant fines simply for participating in the protests last autumn.

Anastasia Bulybenka, who is 19 years old, was expelled from the Belarusian State University, detained, and is now among those on trial. Her case is documented in a recent Amnesty International publication describing the government pressure and aggression addressed to the university teachers and students who joined protests.

Students and teachers were at the heart of the peaceful protests that swept the country in September 2020 after the widely disputed presidential election on 9 August 2020. This prompted incumbent president Alyaksandr Lukashenka on 27 October to call for universities to dismiss all students involved in the demonstrations. Some 30,000 people have since been detained and more than 3,000 have been prosecuted.

As of 21 May, at least 480 students were among those who had been detained according to the Belarusian Students’ Association (BSA).

A number of sentences have already been handed out to some students, which, according to BSA, range from four years for protecting protesters from ‘illegal’ police action, to three years for entering an auditorium during classes and calling for a strike, two years for spray painting a police officer’s shield and one and half years for speaking harshly against a police officer in a message in a local chat.

The detained students now include Sofia Sapega, a student in international law and European law at the European Humanities University (EHU), a Belarusian university forced to relocate to Lithuania in 2004. She was detained on 23 May with her boyfriend the journalist and blogger Roman Protasevich when the Belarusian government illegally diverted their plane to Minsk, provoking a major international controversy.

According to EHU, she was detained on “groundless and made-up conditions”. Four other EHU students and alumni are recognised political prisoners in Belarus.

The European Council called for Sapega and Protasevich’s immediate release, and announced the prolongation of existing and new sanctions.

Concern mounting in European HE community

Concern is mounting within the European higher education community, the EUA-ESU-SAR statement says.

In November 2020, SAR launched a call for action in support of students and scholars in Belarus, and EUA and ESU issued a joint statement calling on the Belarusian authorities “to refrain from suppressing peaceful protests and to guarantee all citizens, including students and university staff, the right to free expression, assembly and protest”.

Unprecedented in its 20-year history, more than 30 parties of the Bologna Process have signed a joint statement on the situation in Belarus. Belarus joined the Bologna Process in 2015, which is committed to educational reform and, notably, academic freedom and institutional autonomy.

“While European governments must urgently pressure the Belarusian authorities to stop violations of human and democratic rights, there is an urgent need for concrete, timely support for scholars and students in Belarus,” the statement says.

Few European countries currently provide scholarships and support for university students and staff at risk, EUA, ESU and SAR Europe say. They call on those and other European countries to “step up these efforts and to establish similar measures at the EU level”.

Michael Gaebel, EUA director of higher education policy, told University World News: “We have seen how the union reacted on the airplane that was forced to land in Minsk. It’s good that we have economic sanctions. But there has to be a more proactive intervention if we want to defend freedom of research and thought worldwide.

“We have to provide a safe haven for those who stand up and defend democratic values and rights and find they have to flee or are expelled from those countries.”

Current examples of initiatives include the InSPIREurope project’s recommendation for a fellowship programme for researchers at risk and the establishment of a similar programme for students, following the example of the Norwegian Students At Risk programme and the German Hilde Domin Programme.

More efforts like this at a European level would underpin the emphasis that the EU and its member states have recently given to autonomy and freedom in the European Education Area Communication, the Bonn Declaration on Freedom of Scientific Research and, most recently, the Global Approach for Cooperation in Research and Innovation, the joint statement says.

“It sends a clear signal globally if we provide European support for students and researchers at risk,” said Gaebel. “The idea would be to have one programme that supports students at risk and another that supports researchers at risk.”

These need to be specifically geared to people who are being threatened with prison or forced to leave their country, which usually happens at speed, with no time to prepare for studying or working in Europe, Gaebel said.

“You can’t apply for Erasmus+ when you have been expelled from your university like many students in Belarus. So we need funds for an organisation that can provide an emergency programme that would allow those at risk to be taken in for at least two years. This is what we are lobbying for with SAR and ESU,” he said.