Wikipedia editor sentenced to year in prison for Belarusian amendments to articles about protests
The court of the Moscow district of the city of Brest sentenced Wikipedia editor Pavel Pernikov to repair a year in a colony for discrediting Belarus. The man wore changes to articles about protests in the country. This was reported by Mediazona Belarus* with reference to human rights activists.
According to investigators, Pernikov edited the article “List of deaths related to protests in Belarus (2020-2021)”. He changed part of the death of Gennady Shutov, as well as the preamble – it stated that the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the country’s authorities did not recognize responsibility for the death of the protesters.
Pernikov also supplemented the article “Censorship in Belarus”. The editor added the line “On October 20, 2004, Veronika Cherkasova, a journalist from the opposition newspaper Salidarnasts, was killed in Minsk.” The state prosecution considered that adding this information to the article about repressions would discredit the state.
In addition, the men imputed publications on the website of a human rights organization about torture and deaths in places of detention. The prosecutor’s office found that Belarus was also discredited in this regard, since the Criminal Prosecution Department for Investigative Investigations did not confirm the information about torture.
Pernikov did not admit his guilt under the article on discrediting the state, but did not deny that he really edited the articles of the publication and did. Forensic prosecutor in a general regime colony.
* The Mediazona portal, recognized by the Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation, is a means of expanding information that performs the functions of a foreign agent.