MOSCOW (Reuters) – Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko has pardoned 42 people convicted of “extremist offences”, state news agency BELTA reported on Wednesday.
Opponents of Lukashenko, who has been in office since 1994, are regularly accused of extremism-related offences which human rights activists say are trumped up to silence them.
BELTA did not give the names of those pardoned.
The Belarusian opposition in exile says that such prisoner releases are a ploy by Lukashenko to try to win sanctions relief from the West which has imposed restrictions on Minsk over its support for Russia and domestic political situation.
Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, exiled since a 2020 presidential election her supporters say was stolen from her, says more than 1,200 political prisoners are still jailed in the former Soviet state, which rounded up all notable opponents of Lukashenko in a violent crackdown on protests after the 2020 vote.
Lukashenko, a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, extended his 31-year rule in another election in January this year that Western countries called a sham. He denies Belarus holds political prisoners or that his re-election was the result of a flawed process.
Among those still jailed in Belarus are key leaders of the 2020 protests, including banker Viktor Babariko and opposition leader Maria Kalesnikava.
(Reporting by Reuters, Writing by Felix Light; editing by Andrew Osborn)
