Belarusian opposition activist Viacheslav Sivchik arrested
In Minsk on 12 September the opposition activist Viacheslav Sivchik was arrested. He was talking in a café with journalist Pavlyuk Bykovsky at around 9 in the evening when special force police officers asked him to show his documents. He did not have his passport and they took him away. Pavlyuk Bykovsky says that they checked everybodys documents, but thinks this was purely going through the motions.
Viacheslav Sivchik was one of the active participants in the tent city erected on October Square in Minsk the day after the presidential elections on 19 March this year. The tent city stood for three days before been broken up by law enforcement units. The politician was detained on the evening of 23 March and taken to the surgery unit of the No. 3 Clinical Hospital in Minsk after being beaten up during the detention (he had medium degree concussion). On 29 March he managed to avoid being taken into custody following his discharge from the hospital.
He spent several months in Ukraine where he was also politically active. On 19 May he was sentenced in his absence by a Belarusian court to 10 days administrative arrest. According to unofficial information Sivchik returned to Belarus about a month ago.