In Belarus, jail sentences for critics and opposition leader in exile, and other stories
In Belarus, jail sentences for critics and opposition leader in exile, and other stories
#WomenLead (Issue 137): Your weekly round-up on women in politics
Hello, and welcome to Issue 137!
In this week’s edition, we bring you updates from Kenya, Nigeria, and the USA, and the spotlight is on Belarus. In case you missed last week’s edition, you can read it here.
Quick Updates
🧑🎓THOUGHTFUL LEADERS: Were there some links between patterns of women's representation in political power and school closures during the Covid-19 pandemic? Yes, says new research published last month.
Danzer et al (2023) analysed a cross-country dataset from Europe and found that higher shares of women in national government were associated with less likelihood of school lockdowns during the pandemic. The authors attribute this pattern to “higher awareness of female politicians about the potential costs that school closures imply for families”. Read the research here.
🥀 REST IN PEACE: The world has lost a number of history-making women in recent days. Grace Onyango, the first woman to become an MP in Kenya, passed away at the age of 98 on Women’s Day. In 1965, she became Kenya’s first female mayor, and in 1969 went on to become the first woman to be elected as an MP.
Franca Afegbua, who in 1983 became the first woman to be elected as a Senator in Nigeria, breathed her last on March 12. A coup d’etat at the end of the same year had cut her political career short. Ann Uccello, the first woman mayor in Connecticut, USA, also passed away last week. After serving on the Hartford city-council during 1963-67, she went on to win the mayoral polls in 1967, and was re-elected twice.
Spotlight: BELARUS🇧🇾🇧🇾🇧🇾
Earlier this month, a court in Belarus sentenced Svyatlana Tsikhanouskaya to 15 years in jail in absentia.
In 2020, three women - Veronika Tsepkalo, Maria Kalesnikava, and Tsikhanouskaya - had come together to challenge the man who has been called “Europe’s last dictator” in the Presidential polls.
Tsikhanouskaya, who was the trio’s presidential candidate, had no prior political experience. But she was in the fight for a reason.
Incumbent Alyaksandr Lukashenka’s authoritarian government had been in power in Belarus for over 26 years. As the elections inched closer, he jailed key opposition candidates preempting popular discontent. This included Sergei Tikhanovsky - Tsikhanouskaya’s husband - who wanted to run for President. (Tsepkalo’s husband had to flee the country to escape arrest, and Kalesnikava decided to fight after Viktor Babariko, whose campaign she worked for, was arrested on bribery charges.)
Even as the women gained popularity, Lukashenka won 80 percent of votes and was back as President for a sixth consecutive time. The results of the elections were widely disputed.
In the aftermath, the three women (and many others) fled the country.
Tsikhanouskaya has now been living in exile in Lithuania for over two years. Earlier this month, a court convicted her for treason and conspiracy to seize power. Her husband is serving an 18-year long sentence - in 2021, he was convicted for causing riots.
She took to Twitter to share her thoughts on the sentencing:
“15 years of prison. This is how the regime ‘rewarded’ my work for democratic changes in Belarus. But today I don't think about my own sentence. I think about thousands of innocents, detained & sentenced to real prison terms.
I won't stop until each of them is released.”
Tsikhanouskaya isn’t the regime’s only target.
Ales Bialiatski, who won the Nobel Prize for Peace in 2022, was given a 10-year prison sentence for smuggling and financing "actions grossly violating public order".
Last week, Marina Zolotova and Lyudmila Chekina, editor and general director of tut.by, an independent media outlet, were sentenced to 12 years. Arrested in 2021, they were initially charged with tax evasion, and later with inciting hatred and calling for sanctions against Belarus, Reuters reported.
Valeria Kasciuhova, founder of a think-tank, and Tatsiana Kuzina, a political scientist, were handed out 10-year sentences after they were convicted of "assisting actions to seize power in an unconstitutional manner", calling for actions aimed at harming national security, and inciting social hatred.
A recently released report by the UN Human Rights Office documents widespread and systematic violations of international human rights law, including unlawful deprivation of life and numerous cases of arbitrary deprivation of liberty, torture and ill-treatment, as well as sexual and gender-based violence, violations of the rights to freedom of expression, peaceful assembly and association, and the denial of due process and equal protection of the law in Belarus.
The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has urged the Government of Belarus to end the systematic repression of perceived critics and immediately release all detainees held on political grounds.
Also read: These Belarusian women are marking International Women’s Day in prison, Open Democracy
Reflections & Reads
Don’t miss this wonderful infographic documenting the participation of women members in Lok Sabha, the lower house of the Indian Parliament, via Economic and Political Weekly
On Aishatu Dahiru, the woman who could be Nigeria’s first elected female governor, via Al Jazeera
“The steady rise and future potential of Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas”, via Meduza
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