Belarus announced on Friday March 5 that it had asked Lithuania for the extradition of Belarusian opposition leader Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, who was being prosecuted in her country for her role in the 2020 post-election protest movement.
Read also: Belarus: the strange escape of Ms. Tikhanovskaya, the opponent of President Lukashenko
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The General Prosecutor's Office of Belarus has asked the General Prosecutor's Office of Lithuania to extradite Svetlana Tikhanovskaya so that she can be prosecuted for crimes against order and public security,
" he said in a statement, specifying to act in accordance with a bilateral legal assistance agreement of 1992.
The regime of Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko has been cracking down on a historic protest movement that arose out of his controversial re-election in August last year.
Rival of Alexander Lukashenko in the presidential election, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, a leading figure in the Belarusian opposition, was forced to take refuge in Lithuania just after the election, after being threatened, she said, by the security services.
The Belarusian authorities accuse him of having organized “
mass unrest
” last year
, a reference to the movement of demonstrations.
She has also been prosecuted since the fall of 2020 for "
calls for actions undermining national security
", a crime punishable by three to five years in prison.
Investigators released a video on Tuesday claiming that it showed Svetlana Tikhanovskaya discussing plans to take over government buildings in Belarus' second largest city, Gomel, after the August presidential election.
The opponent has always insisted on the peaceful nature of the demonstrations, and denounced the use of force and repression orchestrated by the authorities.
Faced with demonstrations bringing together tens of thousands of people, the Belarusian regime gradually muzzled the protest with massive arrests marked by police violence, while the main opponents were imprisoned or forced into exile.
The repression of the protest movement in Belarus has been condemned by Western countries, the EU and the United States having taken sanctions against relatives of the Belarusian president, who, supported by Moscow, has remained deaf to these pressures.
