Belarus crackdown targets not just political activists but also their lawyers

For nearly three years, a harsh crackdown on dissent in Belarus by its authoritarian leader Alexander Lukashenko has filled the country’s penal colonies with thousands of political prisoners, with new arrests reported daily.
At the same time, a government campaign has gotten rid of many independent lawyers, making it increasingly difficult for the detainees to mount any kind of legal defense.
Siarhej Zikratski is among those lawyers forced to leave Belarus under the threat of arrest. More than 500 of his colleagues have been stripped of their law licenses and quit the profession since 2020, and many of them have moved abroad after facing reprisals at home. Some even ended up in prison.
Zikratski says Belarus has effectively run out of independent lawyers to represent the many political prisoners in the country of 9.5 million people, a situation he calls “catastrophic.”