English

UN Human Rights Committee to consider complaint by convicted customs officers, terminal engineers

The UN Human Rights Committee has registered a complaint by twenty-two former inspectors of the Zapadny Buh Customhouse and seven former engineers of the Vestawta terminal about sentences imposed them in a customs duty evasion case several years ago.

"The Committee has sent a copy of the complaint to the Belarusian government and asked it to provide a reply within six months," human rights defender Raman Kislyak told BelaPAN. "I hope that authorities will now admit a judicial error. Such errors violate the rights of specific people and undermine public confidence in the judiciary."

The Belarusian Military Court sentenced the 29 people in question to various terms in prison in 2004 and 2005 on charges of office abuse and complicity in customs duty evasion. Eleven people more were then convicted in the case.

In 2006, a district court in Brest ordered the convicts to pay damages ranging from 80 million rubels to two billion rubels ($37,000 to $935,000) at the request of the Military Prosecutor`s Office.

The evasion case was opened in 2003 after officials of the Zapadny Buh Customhouse studied their database on trucks entering and exiting Belarus and the database of the Polish customs authorities to find out that 82 Polish-bound heavy-duty trucks on the Brest-based Vestawta terminal`s list of cleared vehicles had never entered neighboring Poland.

In the complaint to the UN Human Rights Committee, the 29 convicts say that their trials were unfair and biased and accuse the court of rejecting for no good reason their request for an examination of evidence proving their innocence.

They point out that although none of them was ever a soldier, their case was heard by the military court.

The convicts say that the State Customs Committee acknowledged in 2005 that they were innocent of office abuse. An investigation team of the Prosecutor General`s Office established two years later that only 10 out of the 40 convicts had taken a direct part in the crime, while the rest had been involved in the scheme without realizing it, the complaint says. As a result of a new investigation completed in 2008, the prosecutor general asked the Supreme Court to retry the case against the 30 convicts, but the request was dismissed.

Of the 30, one died following his trial. //BelaPAN