Belarusian political refugee Andrej Zhukavets stands trial in Bialystok
The key feature of this hearing is the presence of media and ordinary people who came to the trial.
It is obvious that both the judge and the prosecutor are surprised with such interest to the trial.
Let us remind you, Andrej Zhukavets (in the picture above) left Belarus in March 1999 for political reasons. A criminal case was started against him for failure to pay a big credit. According to the Belarusian activist, his activity in the opposition was the real reason for that. Zhukavets claims that the case against him is falsified.
The steering commitee for creating the party "Belarusian Christian Democracy", the "Young Front", the solidarity movement "Razam", and the Ukraininan center "Collaboration without Borders" claim their support for Andrej Zhukavets.
Today's trial was interrupted once as it turned out that the prosecutor's and Zhukavets' lawyer's microphones did not work. The judge announced a technical break.
Basyl Segen - translator of documentation enclosed in Zhukavets' case - is giving an interview. Zhukavets is asking the public prosecutor's office to start a criminal case against this translator for falsification of translations.
Zhukavets filed several requests, including the one to transfer the case to the higher court so that the latter transferred it to another region of Poland. According to the Belarusian political refugee, Bialystok court uses "falsified translations of documents from Belarus". When the judge refused, Andrej Zhukavets asked to withdraw the "falsified documents from the case materials". However, the judge refused to do that as well.
After this, Zhukavets requested to provide him another judge, and got another refusal. Th judge claimed that all these requests had already been filed during previous hearings, explaining his refusals.
