Today, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya held an online meeting with the ambassadors of nine countries on the topic of the upcoming negotiations for a peaceful solution to the crisis. Ms. Tsikhanouskaya spoke with the ambassadors of Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Iceland, Ireland, the Netherlands, Estonia, Latvia, and Canada.
During the meeting Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya:
– stressed that it is important to increase the pressure on the regime to stop violence and begin negotiations as soon as possible, given the escalation of repression;
– discussed the possibility of strengthening targeted sanctions against the representatives of the regime that enforce repression, the adoption of the 4th package of EU sanctions, as well as support for Belarusian journalists, human rights defenders, the representatives of student and labor movements, and the small businesses that are in crisis under repression;
– proposed to strengthen the platform for collecting and preserving evidence of gross human rights violations in Belarus (IAPB). This platform will help to hold the perpetrators to justice accountable in international courts;
– told about the latest sentences, searches, interrogations of Enira Branitskaya and Ales Bialiatski, and about the criminal case against the “Viasna” human rights center, which has been working on the IAPB platform;
– suggested that the Foreign Ministries of these countries organize meetings with Belarusian and international experts as part of preliminary consultations on the preparation for negotiations with international mediation;
– proposed to organize hearings in the UN Security Council on the escalation of violence and a peaceful solution to the crisis in Belarus, since Norway and Estonia are non-permanent members of the Security Council;
– thanked Sweden for the offer to use the OSCE as the main platform for organizing negotiations and proposed to develop a road map.
