BHC offers assistance to illegally detained after blast

• 18.07.2008, 15:15

The chairman of the Belarusian Helsinki Committee Aleh Hulak calls upon everybody who had been illegally detained in the case of the blast on July 4 in Minsk, to defend their rights. He offers assistance of BCH lawyers.

The BCH is following how the investigation of the case on July 4 blast is carried out. It plans to prepare a legal opinion on this case.

“In our monitoring we are making the list of events related to this investigation, and qualify them as a pressure on civil society. There are reasons for that. It is a little too early to make legal evaluation, we are to make it when there would be more facts,” the human rights activist told to Radio Svaboda.

As said by Hulak, the BCH studies the possibility to receive moral compensation for ungrounded and illegal detention by investigators, and human rights activists are ready to offer assistance to those who have been affected. These people should go to court, Aleh Hulak believes.

“It is not easy, but it is necessary to do so… In this way people defend not only defend their rights, but rights of others. It is not only a solution of other problems, but an influence on the system, so that it wouldn’t allow itself the things it had allowed this time. Law-enforcing agencies have a right to detain suspects. But this right should be used carefully, and only in the cases when there are enough evidence of a person’s implication. And to detain a person on some suspicions for 10 days, it shouldn’t be done like that,” the BCH chairman is convinced.