On 24 March, the International Accountability Platform for Belarus (IAPB) was established. Poland is a co-founder of the IAPB.
The initiative aims to monitor the state of human rights in Belarus and to gather evidence of violations by state institutions in the run-up to the August 2020 presidential elections and after the rigged elections. We expect that the prepared documentation will be used for subsequent trials before Belarusian or international courts so that those responsible for these acts suffer legal consequences. In case the UN establishes an international mechanism for an investigation into human rights violations in BY, all documentation will be handed over to the United Nations.
The Platform will consist of Belarusian and international non-governmental organisations specialised in the field of human rights protection. The Danish organisation DYGNITY (the Danish Institute Against Torture) will play the role of coordinator. The Platform’s budget consists of voluntary contributions from all the initiator countries of this project, but their role ends with the provision of support and the non-governmental organisations co-creating the Platform retain the full independence of their activities.
The establishment of the IAPB is the result of the report on human rights violations in Belarus prepared by OSCE Rapporteur Professor Benedek under the Moscow Mechanism launched by 17 OSCE participating states (including Poland). One of the report’s recommendations was to establish an independent body documenting such cases for later processes.
For many months, Poland has consistently supported Belarusian non-governmental organisations involved in documenting human rights violations by Belarus’s security forces. It is our duty to Belarusians.
Our goal remains to support a sovereign Belarus and to peacefully end the political crisis, including the holding of free and fair presidential elections with the equal participation of the democratic opposition, as well as the release of all those wrongly arrested and convicted (journalists, oppositionists, activists).
