Belarus Drug Offenders Singled Out in “Intolerable Prison Conditions”

By Avinash Tharoor

Prisoners convicted of drug offences in Belarus are being forced to wear identifying badges and endure harsh conditions as part of the government’s increasingly repressive drug policy.

Over the past two years, the Belarusian government has ramped up its punitive approach towards people who commit drug offences. The intensification has been spearheaded by the country’s president, Alexander Lukashenko, a self-described authoritarian who has ruled the country since 1994, and is commonly referred to as “Europe’s last dictator”.

Lukashenko specifically advocates the systemic marginalisation of people who commit drug offences. In 2014, he demanded that people incarcerated for drug offences be segregated from other prisoners, and kept in “intolerable imprisonment conditions”. Indeed, later that year, the state began allocating specific prisons for “drug addicts” to be sent to, according to Charter 97, a pro-democracy Belarusian news site.

In April 2016, Siarhei Daroshka, the country’s interior minister, declared that people imprisoned for drug offences must face harsher “moral and living conditions” than people incarcerated for any other crimes.

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Thumbnail: Wikimedia Commons - Kremlin