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Russian environmentalist Ozharovsky released after serving seven-day jail sentence

Russian environmentalist Andrei Ozharovsky was released from jail in Astravets, Hrodna region, on October 16 after serving a seven-day jail sentence that was imposed on him by the Astravets District Court.

Mr. Ozharovsky, coordinator of a Moscow-based environmental organization called Ekozashchita who is a nuclear physicist by education, arrived at Astravets on October 9 to attend a public hearing on the environmental impact of a nuclear power plant to be built in the Astravets district. He was arrested by plainclothesmen after he went out of the building where the hearing was being held to take copies of a printed statement critical of the project from his car and return to the meeting.

Mr. Ozharovsky was taken to the Astravets district police station where about 100 copies of a document titled, “Critical Opinions on the Interim Report on the Assessment of the Environmental Impact of the Belarusian Nuclear Power Plant,” were seized from him.

According to Mr. Ozharovsky, nobody could explain to him why police officers did not seize anonymous flyers in support of the nuclear power plant project that were passed out at the hearing without hindrance. “Those flyers contained false information about the project,” he noted.

As Mr. Ozharovsky said, his flyers were in a bag and he only planned to distribute them during the hearing. “I was approached by police officers in plain clothes and a man of the name of Sviryd, who said he was an officer of the Nuclear Power Plant Project Directorate. He told me that he was prohibiting me from bringing material critical of the project into the building.”

On the same day a judge of the Astravets District Court sentenced Mr. Ozharovsky to seven days in jail for allegedly disorderly conduct.

There were seven witnesses against the accused, including five police officers and two young women, who alleged that Mr. Ozharovsky had “behaved defiantly toward persons around him, representatives of authorities and citizens by throwing his bag of printed literature and attempting to make his way into the building.”

According to the ruling, the judge found that “the deliberate actions of the offender disturbed the peace in a public place, could disrupt the hearing and constituted obvious contempt of the public.”

There were three witnesses for the accused, but the judge dismissed their evidence as unreliable, explaining that it had been given for the purpose of helping him escape punishment, and that they were associates of the accused.

Mr. Ozharovsky told BelaPAN on his release on Friday that the charge against him was absurd. “Belarusian authorities feared that something against the official standpoint might be said,” he noted. “This suggests that the people who are to build the nuclear power plant lack confidence.”

Mr. Ozharovsky pointed out that he would continue fighting against nuclear power plants in Belarus and Russia and would ignore authorities’ attempts at intimidating him.