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,...
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Nikolaj joined EUobserver in 2012 and covers home affairs. He is originally from Denmark, but spent much of his life in France and in Belgium. He was awarded the King Baudouin Foundation grant for investigative journalism in 2010.