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CEE News Archive
Belarus Jails Another Christian Leader
CWNews.com
March 28, 2006
Minsk, Mar. 28 (Forum 18/CWNews.com) - For the second time this month, the government of Belarus has jailed a Christian leader for conducting unauthorized religious activity, the Forum 18 news service reports. Eleven days after Baptist pastor Georgi Vyazovsky completed a 10-day prison sentence for leading unregistered religious activity, a second Protestant was detained and sentenced on similar charges. Sergei Shavtsov, who organized a seminar of Christian business leaders in a private cafe in the capital Minsk after official permission was denied, was detained after police raided the seminar on March 24. "The court offered Sergei a choice of a massive fine or ten days in prison; he chose prison," his wife Dina Shavtsova told Forum 18 from Minsk. Shavtsova said the Christian Business Initiative, a registered social organization which supports Christians in business, had originally intended to hold the seminar in the Christ for the Nations Christian college in Minsk's Frunze district. Vitali Misevets, head of the Frunze district ideology department, refused official permission to hold the seminar at the college. "It's not absurd to deny permission for such a meeting," he told Forum 18. "How do we know what 35 people were going to be discussing?"
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