Young prisoners' health at growing risk

Vladislav Sharkovsky is serving a ten-year sentence and Emil Ostrovko is serving a six-year sentence (reduced from the original sentence of eight years). Their cases are separate, but they have a lot in common, between them and with many other young people in Belarus. Both worked as couriers for anonymous online companies and were arrested in 2018 at the age of 17. Both were subjected to ill-treatment by police and had their right to a fair trial violated. Both were convicted of drug trafficking as part of a group and sentenced to long prison terms. Vladislav Sharkovsky’s prison term is longer however, because he has been sentenced as a member of an “organised group” which is a more serious crime. Conspicuously, in neither case any other members of the “group” have ever been identified by the investigation and prosecuted. Vladislav Sharkovsky and Emil Ostrovko share the fate of many other children and young people in Belarus. 

Belarus’s approach to drugs is based on highly punitive laws and practice. No official statistics is available, but it is estimated that hundreds, and possibly thousands, of children and young people are serving lengthy sentences for minor, non-violent drug-related offences. In some cases, reported to Amnesty International, those arrested have not willingly committed any crime but were forced by drug-combating officials to become their secret informants and framed for non-cooperation and failing to incriminate others. 

Children accused of drug-related offences face many human rights violations from the moment they are arrested, during the investigation and trial, and once they are sentenced; many are held in conditions that do not meet minimum standards of detention and violate international human rights law. 

All too often, children and young people in Belarus fall victim to deceptive practices of anonymous individuals who sell drugs online, including by advertising “courier jobs”, which entice them to traffic illicit drugs, sometimes without their knowledge or full understanding of the nature of the “job”. They are arrested as suspected drug traffickers for collecting clandestinely placed parcels containing illicit substances and delivering them to clients. Typically, they are unaware of who stands behind the online companies that employ them, but are nonetheless prosecuted as part of a “group” or an “organised group”, under parts 3 or 4 of Article 328 of the Criminal Code of the Republic of Belarus, which are crimes punishable by a minimum of six (previously eight) and ten years respectively. 

Amnesty International calls for the release of all those young people prosecuted under Article 328 who were children at the time of the offence, irrespective of which part of the article they have been charged or sentenced under.  

The Convention of the Rights of the Child, to which Belarus is a state party, establishes that the arrest or detention of children must be a measure of last resort, and must be for the shortest appropriate period of time. The Committee on the Rights of the Child has consistently called on states to avoid the treatment of children as criminals for their use or possession of drugs and has recommended states not to subject children who use drugs to criminal proceedings. Moreover, the Committee has recommended states to consider alternatives to criminalization when dealing with children accused of having committed minor, non-violent drug-related offences.