Ales Bialiatski: Two years of silence in Belarus penal colony

Belarus political prisoner Ales Bialiatski spoke his first words in two years upon his release from a labour camp in late June.

The human rights defender worked six days a week in silence at a sewing factory inside the Bobruisk high-security penal colony in south-eastern Belarus.

The isolation continued in his cell with other inmates.

“We were 15 people in the same room but for two years I didn’t speak,” he told this website in Brussels on Tuesday (1 July).

Bialiatski,...