Political prisoner Yury Rubtsou to be sentenced on May 28

Trial of political prisoner Yury Rubtsou is underway in Pruzhany. Pruzhany District Court Judge Mikalai Rapikha said that the verdict will be announced by 15:30 on May 28. He did not indicate the exact time.

The prosecutor demanded for Mr Rubtsou three years imprisonment in a general regime prison.

During his last statement, Mr Rubtsou said that that day he was judged not for the fact that he refused to work, but for the fact that he demanded a salary that had been promised by President Alyaksandr Lukashenka.

The political prisoner is serving a 1.5 year sentence in the special settlement in the village Kuplin (Pruzhany district). In early April, Yury Rubtsou was placed in a detention facility, where he went on hunger strike.

Yury Rubtsou was placed in the settlement after he was sentenced in autumn 2014 for insulting the judge. He took part in the march in Minsk on the anniversary of the Charnobyl disaster, he was wearing a T-shirt with the inscription "Lukashenka, go away." Mr Rubtsou was detained, he was brought to court without a shirt. When the judge Kiryl Palupyekh agreed to try him looking like that, the man called him a name the judge considered an insult.