Sentenced Belsat journalists won Leipzig Prize
Two journalists with Belsat TV Katsaryna Bahvalava (Andreyeva is her pen name -n/tr.) and Darya Chultsova, who had been sentenced to two years of penal colony, were awarded the Leipzig Prize "For Freedom and the Future of the Media", as DW Belarus reported.
They were rewarded for "becoming voices of free journalistic reporting under the autocratic regime and suffering for their work." Each of the journalists was awarded 10 thousand euros.
The European Center for Freedom of the Press, based in Leipzig called for the release of Bahvalava and Chultsova.
The award is presented annually in October in Leipzig, but how the ceremony will take place this year is not yet known.
As IMI reported, on February 18, 2021, the Frunzensky District Court of Minsk sentenced two journalists of the Belsat TV channel, Katseryna Bahvalava and Darya Chultsova, to two years in a maximum security penal colony.
Belsat journalists Kateryna Bahvalava and Darya Chultsova were detained on November 15, 2020 in Minsk in an apartment on the 14th floor of a building on Zmin Square. From this apartment journalists carried a stream about opposition of security officers and defenders of the national memorial to the lost citizen of Minsk Roman Bondarenko.
On November 20, 2020, Bakhvalava was charged under Article 1 of Art. 342 of the Criminal Code ("Organization and preparation of actions that grossly violate public order").
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