MINSK (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 31st January, 2023) Sofia Sapega, a Russian citizen who is serving a six-year term in Belarus, was denied a pardon due to insufficient grounds for such a decision, Olga Chupris, deputy head of the Belarusian presidential administration, said on Tuesday.
On May 6, 2022, a court sentenced Sapega, who was arrested with her opposition activist boyfriend when an airliner they were on was forced to land in Belarus, to six years in prison on several charges, including publishing private information about security officials and inciting social hatred. In June, Sapega wrote a petition to Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko asking for a pardon, her family's lawyer Anton Gashinsky told Sputnik. On January 10, Sapega's stepfather said that she had been denied clemency.
"(Pardon was) denied absolutely lawfully. For an act of pardon to take place, a number of conditions must be met. In particular, the convict, who expressed a desire to write such a petition addressed to the president, did not even serve at least half of the term. Nonetheless, she had the right to apply. The president had the right to pardon in this case as well. But if we evaluate all the criteria as a whole, then in this case there were no exceptions that would serve as the basis for the head of state to make such a decision," Chupris was quoted as saying by Belarusian state-run news agency Belta.
In May 2021, a Ryanair plane traveling from Greece to Lithuania made an emergency landing in Minsk over a fake bomb threat. Sapega and her boyfriend, Roman Protasevich, a co-founder of a Telegram channel that Minsk has designated as extremist after it helped organize post-election protests in Belarus, were arrested during a stopover at the airport. Protasevich has since made public confessions of his crimes and transferred to house arrest.
