As expressions of concern and outrage pile up over the possible fate of Belarusian journalist and regime critic Andrey Hnyot, the 42-year-old exile remains in legal limbo in an extradition battle, he says, “to save my life.”
Hnyot remains as active as his ankle-braceleted confinement to a modest, 20-square-meter apartment in Serbia’s capital allows, while his lawyers appeal a Belgrade High Court ruling from June 13 that would send him back to Belarus’s authoritarian rulers.
In his first interview since his transfer on June 5 from seven months in a Serbian jail cell to home incarceration, Hnyot told RFE/RL’s Balkan Service that he now works “from morning to night” on his defense.
The prospect of a forced return — Hnyot, rights groups, and the European Union agree — is enough to terrify and motivate even the hardiest champions of democracy, free speech, and the rule of law.
Since Hnyot participated in unprecedented protests after the disputed 2020 vote in which Alyaksandr Lukashenka claimed an improbable 80 percent of the vote and a sixth term as Belarus’s president, Europe’s longest-reigning leader has overseen a crackdown that has left thousands of political opponents missing, fleeing, or in prison.
“Torture, blood, nightmare,” is how Hnyot describes the regime in his homeland, which he fled soon after the protests to seek safe shelter in Thailand.
He dismisses the accusations of tax fraud at the center of an arrest warrant issued from Minsk via the International Criminal Police Organization, known as Interpol, as “ridiculous, nonsense.”
Officials in Serbia arrested Hnyot upon his arrival at Belgrade airport on October 30 on the basis of that warrant and locked him up in isolation at the city’s central prison.
A court of first instance green-lighted his deportation to Belarus in December, but an appellate court overturned that decision and ordered a new hearing that eventually led to the High Court’s decision earlier this month to extradite him.
Hnyot’s case has heightened international scrutiny on Moscow’s allies in Serbia as the Kremlin seeks diplomatic and other support from Belgrade to ease the economic and diplomatic isolation brought on by its unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.
It also highlights longstanding criticism of Interpol and whether its system of issuing warrants based on claims by authoritarian regimes furthers its stated goal of uniting disparate law enforcement organizations to “make the world a safer place.”
The European Union responded to the latest extradition ruling with a blistering warning for authorities in EU candidate Serbia.
“There are sufficient grounds to believe that the arrest warrant against Mr. Hnyot was motivated by political reasons, and that he would face political repression and ill-treatment if he were to be extradited to Belarus,” EU spokesman Peter Stano told RFE/RL in a statement.
The specter of becoming an accessory to authoritarian-style persecution has already tested notions of justice inside the European Union itself.
Moscow has so far failed in its efforts to squeeze member states like Bulgaria to repatriate critics of Putin’s war.
The EU is following the Serbian case with concern, Stano said, adding, “We expect that Mr. Hnyot’s case will be carefully examined in accordance with international human rights law and EU standards, and we continue to call for his release.”
The U.S. Embassy in Belgrade would say only that it is monitoring the case.
“This is an ongoing judicial process, and the Embassy is closely following it,” it said in a written statement earlier this month. Embassy spokespeople did not answer repeated telephone calls seeking additional comment on June 19.
Neither the EU nor the United States recognize Lukashenka’s legitimacy since the 2020 election seen by the opposition and many Western nations as having been “rigged, and the subsequent brutal crackdown he launched against any and all dissent.
Interpol did not respond to multiple RFE/RL requests via official channels for comment on its practices, Hnyot’s case, and the reliability of accusations from a repressive regime like Belarus, which has been accused of hijacking an international flight to capture a dissident and “weaponizing” third-country migrants against its EU neighbors.
It has previously responded to criticism of its use of “red notices” and other international alerts to track down fugitives from dubious charges by bad-faith regimes as their numbers have skyrocketed by highlighting its collaborative, membership structure. Its Lyon-based leadership has previously acknowledged that it’s not a “perfect system.”
Interpol told RFE/RL in February that “all requests sent by the National Central Bureau in Minsk are carefully reviewed to ensure compliance with Interpol rules and procedures.”
But it has produced no public findings from an investigation it was said to have launched into Hnyot’s arrest and possible extradition from Serbia.
“It looks like nobody is listening to me,” Hnyot told RFE/RL after the Serbian High Court’s June 13 decision in favor of extradition, which he called “empty and formal.”
He said the court dismissed his defense arguments as “opinion” and was overly deferential to an extradition agreement concluded between Serbia and Belarus in 2019.
But free-speech and free-press groups including the International Press Institute, the European Federation of Journalists, and the banned Belarusian Association of Journalists have all raised their voices to call for Hnyot’s release.
The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) reiterated its concern over the case with a fresh appeal on June 18, saying Serbia’s courts “must not indulge a request from Belarusian authorities and should overturn” the Belgrade High Court’s decision.
CPJ Program Director Carlos Martinez de la Serna called the Belarusian request “absurd and unfounded” and demanded Belarusian authorities “stop their attempts to instrumentalize Interpol to transnationally repress dissenting voices.”
Serbian authorities are allowed to detain individuals for up to one year in extradition cases.
As Hnyot and his defense team organize his appeal, he remains confined to the rented apartment that he found with the help of his lawyers. His only escape is the allowed hour’s walk to shop for food and other essentials that he said people normally take for granted.
He uses his smartphone and laptop to communicate with his family, human rights groups, ambassadors, activists, and journalists.
On the day of the RFE/RL correspondent’s visit, June 14, Hnyot said he spoke for the first time with exiled Belarusian opposition leader Svyatlana Tsikhanouskaya, to whom he had written from jail.
Tsikhanouskaya is herself the target of a Belarusian warrant that Moscow says extends to Russia by virtue of bilateral agreements with Minsk, and he said she responded “by personally advocating for his case.”
Hnyot said they spoke not about politics or his case but rather “talked as friends.” “That gave me a lot of energy,” he said.
House arrest is a step up from prison, he said, even if he still has no family members in Belgrade to come visit him.
“Everything can be good and everything can look good and normal after prison,” he told RFE/RL. “When you’ve been in hell, everything that comes after it is better than hell.”