Lawyer of Belarus Activist Trapped in Serbia: Indictment is Pure Politics

The request by Belarus to extradite the activist Andrey Gnyot from Serbia is politically motivated – and could put his life in danger, his lawyer tells BIRN.

When 42-year-old Andrey Gnyot landed in Belgrade on October 30, 2023, to direct a commercial, he was shocked when police officers took him aside.

It turned out that the movie commercial director and activist from Belarus was on an Interpol warrant list, facing accusations of tax evasion.

Four months later, he is still in Belgrade’s District Prison, fearing that the Serbian authorities, which maintain good ties with Alexandar Lukashenko’s authoritarian regime in Minsk, will extradite him.

The High Court in Belgrade on December 7 ruled that “the conditions for the extradition” of Gnjot had been met. His legal team appealed to the Court of Appeal.

Gnyot is accused of evading around 300,000 euros in taxes related to four video-producing companies.

He insists the accusations are political and that the Minsk regime considers him a dangerous opponent because he was one of the founders of the Free Association of Athletes of Belarus, an initiative founded after disputed presidential elections in Belarus in 2020.

When the Association backed opposition protests against the election result, Belarus’s State Security Committee, its own version of the KGB, labeled it an “extremist formation”.

Gnyot disclosed that he was one of three founders of the organisation on February 19, in a hearing before the Belgrade Appeal Court, which will finally decide his extradition.

“I created the logo, I started the Instagram page, I am the ideological leader of the organisation,” Gnyot told the court.

Andrey Gnyot. Photo: Private archive/Instagram

His lawyer, Filip Sofijanic, told BIRN in an interview that his client’s life is at stake if he is sent to Minsk.

“He is afraid because if he is extradited, he feels he will be tortured back there, like other Belarus dissidents,” Sofijanic told BIRN.

His client claims he was indeed among the organisers of the Association of Athletes and was involved in the anti-Lukashenko protests in 2020.

“But that is not anti-state behaviour. Belarus called the organisation ‘extremist’ but we will try to explain to the court that these are political accusations and have nothing to do with tax evasion,” Sofijanic said.

In 2020, the largest anti-government protests in the history of Belarus, which Gnyot and the Athletes Association supported, shook the rule of Lukashenko, who has governed the ex-Soviet state with an iron fist for three decades.

The protests emerged in the wake of elections that many observers and protesters claimed were rigged. The EU also called them illegitimate.

The Free Association of Athletes of Belarus lobbied international sporting associations to express concern about what was happening in Belarus.

Gnyot told the court that one of their successes was Lukashenko’s removal as head of the National Olympic Committee. In December 2020, the International Olympic Committee suspended any discussions about hosting future Olympic events in Belarus.

Serbia media reported on February 19 that Gnyot told the appeal court that they had “managed what the politicians failed to do; we took one armchair from the dictator”.

No idea he was even on an Interpol list

While the Belarus state accuses Gnyot of “tax optimization in some four video producing companies, which would mean he evaded tax,” Sofijanic says the accusations are false.

He says Gynot does not have anything to do with two of the four companies, while for the other two, he says, it would mean he formed a conspiracy with his bookkeepers.

“That would mean that he persuaded his accountants to embezzle money and not pay taxes. The entire financial structure of the accusations is based on the statement of an accountant who died in 2016,” Sofijanic notes.

He adds that Gnyot is also being prosecuted retroactively, since the alleged criminal acts happened from 2012 to 2018, while the law that deals with such acts was only passed in 2019.

“In Serbian law, for example, all of that would be considered a simple misdeameanour case,” the lawyer stresses.

Gnyot’s lawyer Filip Sofijanic. Photo: Iva Martinovic/RSE

In June 2021, Gnyot moved from Minsk to Moscow and later to Thailand, where he worked and lived until his arrest in Serbia in October 2023.

It was not his first visit to Serbia, Sofijanic says, as he already worked in Serbia during August that same year.

“He did not even know there was a warrant against him. He works in Thailand, earns decent money there and has rented a house there for a year already. This thing has ruined his life,” the lawyer explains.

The fact that Interpol put him on a warrant list on the order of Belarus authorities is also problematic, he says.

“The Minsk claims do not have credibility. The economic reasons for the warrant were put there because they [Interpol] would not accept political ones, to issue a warrant,” Sofijanic says.

The Viasna Human Rights Centre in Minsk reported in 2023 that 1,511 people in Belarus have been detained on politically motivated charges since the protests in 2020, documenting an average of 17 arbitrary arrests and detentions a day.

UN experts in May 2023 called on the Belarus authorities to immediately release all prisoners in the country detained on spurious charges for exercising their fundamental rights to peaceful assembly, association and expression.

The watchdog organisation Human Rights Watch, HRW, reports that throughout 2023, political prisoners continued to face torture and ill-treatment during short-term arrests and in detention, including in pre-trial custody and penal establishments.

Belgrade hails Minsk dictator as ‘sincere friend’

One problem for Gnyot is that Serbia and Belarus have friendly relations. Belarus has consistently opposed recognition of Kosovo’s independence – a hot issue for Serbia – and voted against Kosovo joining the UN cultural body UNESCO in 2015.

However, in August 2020, Serbia backed an EU declaration saying that the presidential elections in Belarus were “neither free nor fair” and criticising the crackdown on post-electoral protests.

In 2021, Serbia also aligned itself with EU sanctions on Minsk, imposed after the Belarus authorities hijacked a Ryanair plane and boarded it to arrest an opposition activist.

But Lukashenko has made several visits to Serbia since he came to power. In 1999 he arrived during the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, a move seen as supportive of then- Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic.

Relations between Serbia and Belarus grew closer after the Serbian Progressive Party took power in Belgrade in 2012.

Lukashenko last visited Serbia in December 2019 and gave a speech in the Serbian parliament, where he responded to criticism about the lack of democracy in his country by saying that elections in Belarus could not be more democratic than they already are.

Serbia’s President, Aleksandar Vucic, stressed during that visit that Belarus had “never voted against Serbia” and “had always been with us”. He said Belarus would always have “a sincere friend in Serbia”.

Sofijanic fears these cosey bilateral relations could influence the decision of Appeal Court.

Serbia has extradited persons before, despite a clear danger of them being tortured as political prisoners.

In 2018, it extradited Cevdet Ayaz, a Kurdish politician, to Turkey, over alleged terrorism charges – despite appeals from rights groups and a UN Committee against Torture ruling saying he should not be forcibly removed until his case was fully considered.

Sofijanic hopes his client will not end up the same way. His office checks daily to see if the Appeal Court has made a decision, since, if the decision is negative, his client risks being extradited quickly.

“If the Appeal Courts confirms the [extradition] decision, it is just one signature from the Justice Minister [Maja Popovic] and then he can be sent to Belarus,” he says.

“That would be horrible for him. He doubts he will stay alive in a Belarus prison,” he concludes.