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Letter of Appeal from the AAAS Committee on Scientific Freedom and Responsibility

His Excellency Aleksandr Lukashenko
President of the Republic of Belarus
Office of the President
220010 Minsk, Minsk oblast
BELARUS
Faxes: 011 375 172 223872 or 011 375 172 260610


Dear Mr. President:

The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is the largest organization of natural and social scientists in the United States, and the world's largest federation of scientific organizations, with 135,000 individual members and 275 affiliated groups. Our AAAS Committee on Scientific Freedom and Responsibility was formed in 1976 to protect the human rights of scientists and to deal with issues relating to scientific freedom worldwide.

On behalf of the Committee, I am writing to express our concern about the ongoing investigation of Dr. Yury Bandazhevsky. In July 1999, Bandazhevsky was arrested in Gomel. Throughout his detention, Dr. Bandazhevsky was denied basic rights as defined in the Universal Convention of Human Rights. He was held for a month without being charged. Dr. Bandazhevsky was not given access to a lawyer or allowed to see his family for three weeks. After he was finally able to contact his lawyer, but before the lawyer's first visit to see his client, Dr. Bandazhevsky was transferred to a prison in Mogilev 100 miles away. His lawyer continued to have trouble gaining access to consult with his client in Mogilev because Dr. Bandazhevsky was held in a temporary isolation cell for a month. Later, Bandazhevsky was transferred to a maximum-security prison in Minsk. While in prison, he suffered from a stomach condition. He was finally released from pre-trial detention in December 1999, and eventually allowed to return to Gomel.

In August 1999, Dr. Bandazhevsky was formally charged with taking bribes from students seeking admission to the Gomel Medical Institute, an institute that Dr. Bandazhevsky founded and served as its rector until 1999. It is the Committee's understanding that a colleague of Dr. Bandazhevsky initially made the allegations of bribery, but subsequently withdrew the charge.

The Committee fears that Dr. Bandazhevsky may be targeted because of his criticism of the government's health policies. Last year, Dr. Bandazhevsky wrote a report on research conducted at the Belarusian Ministry of Health's Institute of Radiation Medicine, which criticized the way the Ministry of Health was spending its resources, and questioned the Institute's scientific findings.

The committee respectfully requests that an independent and impartial investigation be conducted in an expeditious manner and that if evidence does not exist to support the charge of bribery that all charges against Dr. Yury Bandazhevsky be dropped.


Sincerely,
Irving Lerch
Chair
AAAS Committee on Scientific Freedom and Responsibility

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