New York, September 17, 2024—Belarusian filmmaker Andrey Gnyot is stuck in a legal limbo after a Serbian appeals court announced on September 11 that it had sent his extradition case to the Belgrade Higher Court for a third review.
Gnyot, who is currently under house arrest, has been held by Serbian authorities since October 2023 and could face seven years in jail if extradited to Belarus and convicted on tax evasion charges.
Gnyot told CPJ on September 12 that the “most dangerous thing” about waiting for the hearing, which he said was probably one month away, was it would give President Aleksandr Lukashenko’s authoritarian government more time to “make up any number of new fake criminal cases against me” to persuade Serbia to grant its extradition request.
“If Serbia extradites Andrey Gnyot to Belarus, it could set a dangerous precedent for Belarusian authorities’ transnational repression of journalists and profoundly undermine Serbia’s aspirations to join the European Union,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator. “If Serbia is serious about being an EU candidate country, it must respect the bloc’s values of democracy and human rights. Serbian authorities must end these baseless judicial proceedings and free Gnyot immediately.”
Serbia applied for EU membership in 2009, but European Commissioner Oliver Varhelyi said in May that the country still needed to proceed with democratic reforms.
Harassment beyond Belarusian borders
Belarusian authorities cracked down on independent media following 2020 protests against Lukashenko’s disputed reelection. As hundreds of journalists have fled into exile, the government has stepped up its efforts to reach beyond its borders to harass them. This includes stripping citizenship from exiles convicted on anti-state charges, banning citizens from renewing their passports abroad, initiating criminal proceedings against several exiled journalists, and searching the Belarusian homes of others who have left the country. CPJ is working to determine whether the prosecutions are connected to the journalists’ work.
In 2021, Belarusian authorities arrested journalist Raman Pratasevich and his girlfriend after diverting a commercial Ryanair flight to the capital Minsk. In 2023, Pratasevich was given an eight-year sentence on charges that included organizing protests and insulting the president, while exiled former colleagues from his Telegram channel NEXTA, Stsypan Putsila and Yan Rudzik, were given sentences in absentia of 20 and 19 years respectively. Pratasevich was later pardoned.
During the 2020 protests, Gnyot worked with independent news outlets, including Radio Svaboda, the Belarusian service of U.S. Congress-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), and co-founded SOS BY, an independent sports association that influenced the cancellation of the 2021 Hockey World Cup in Belarus. Belarusian authorities later designated both organizations as “extremist.”
‘I’m not giving up’
Serbian authorities arrested Gnyot upon his arrival in the country on October 30, 2023, based on an Interpol arrest warrant issued by the Belarusian Interpol bureau. After seven months in prison, he was transferred to house arrest in June. He denies the charges.
“No one knows for how long I am stuck in this ‘terminal’ between the East and the West and for how much [longer] I will have enough moral, material, and physical resources. I’m not giving up. But, of course, I’m angry,” Gnyot told CPJ. “I am left in detention, without a job, without means of livelihood, with one hour out of the house, without medical care.”
Belarus is among the world’s worst jailers of journalists, often using “extremism” laws to incarcerate journalists in retaliation for covering the 2020 protests. At least 28 journalists were behind bars when CPJ conducted its most recent annual prison census on December 1, 2023. (Gnyot was not listed as being held in Serbia at the time due to a lack of information about the connection between Gnyot’s detention and his journalism.)
A 2023 U.S. State Department report found that prisoners in Belarus jails face harsh conditions, including food and heating shortages, gross overcrowding, and lack of access to basic or emergency medical care.
