BELARUS: Belorussian courts yesterday jailed for up to 15 days more than 150 mostly young protesters detained when police broke up rallies against a presidential election judged unfair by the West.
The European Union, at loggerheads with Minsk over a poll it considers rigged, urged the protesters' release while a Polish diplomat was barred from entering Belarus.
Main opposition leader Alexander Milinkevich tagged the trials a farce and said his supporters would campaign nationwide to win more public backing and organise bigger protests.
Second opposition leader Alexander Kozulin, arrested at the weekend, could face six years in jail on hooliganism charges.
The opposition rallied up to 10,000 supporters for protests in the past week, demonstrations unmatched in recent years in a country where President Alexander Lukashenko rules with a Soviet-style authoritarian hand.
But the protests against his re-election with a landslide 83 per cent a week ago came to an abrupt halt on Saturday when police broke up a march and detained dozens of demonstrators.
At the Leninsky District Court on Minsk's outskirts, a judge read out verdicts in a monotone, sentencing six young women to seven days in jail, in less than 30 minutes. No defence lawyers were present and the verdicts for taking part in an unauthorised rally were rubber-stamped irrespective of whether the accused pleaded guilty or not.
"This is a sheer farce, this is not a real trial," said Mr Milinkevich, whose son was given a 15-day sentence by another court, according to a human rights group. "The judge was virtually ashamed to raise his eyes."
Another court sentenced a former Polish ambassador to Belarus, Mariusz Maszkiewicz, to 15 days in jail, while Polish journalism trainee Weronika Samolinska was jailed for 10 days.
Meanwhile on Belarus's western border, Ianusz Dabrowski, Polish consul in the city of Grodno, was barred from entering the country when he refused to let officers search his car. "As I understand it, what is happening is, of course, connected to the situation in Belarus," he said.