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Two Russian human rights defenders given 24 hours to leave Belarus

Two Russian human rights defenders were ordered by the Belarusian authorities late on Wednesday to leave the country within 24 hours, BelaPAN said. 

Aleksandr Mnatsakanyan and Viktoriya Gromova were arrested in Minsk earlier that day. They were released at around 11 p.m., said a representative of the Observation Mission of the International Committee for Monitoring the Human Rights Situation in Belarus.

Several more rights defenders, including Russian citizens Irina Paykacheva, Yury Dzhibladze and Lyubov Zakharova and Ukrainian national Volodymyr Chemeris, were also briefly detained but were not ordered to leave Belarus.

The activists were arrested when police raided the office of the Vyasna human rights group to disrupt a news conference at which they planned to present a report on a post-election demonstration staged by opposition supporters in Minsk on December 19, 2010, its brutal dispersal by authorities and the subsequent crackdown on government opponents. The report had been drawn up by a group of experts led by Neil Jarman of the United Kingdom.

"Belarus is afraid of an independent assessment of the human rights situation," the Observation Mission said.

Explaining the reason for their raid, the police claimed that they had received a phone call that suspicious boxes had been moved there earlier in the day. No suspicious items were found inside the office, but all those present there were apprehended.

Earlier this year, Russian human rights defenders Ivan Kondratenko and Andrey Yurov were arrested and ordered by the authorities to leave Belarus.