On October 7, 2024, the HCAV office was contacted by Belarusian citizen Vladimir Balandin, who is under our legal protection. V. Balandin was informed that he was about to be extradited to the Belarusian authorities.
According to the Constitution of the Republic of Armenia, domestic legislation, and international treaties and conventions ratified by the Republic of Armenia, no one may be extradited to a foreign state, even if it is the state of the person’s citizenship, if there are serious grounds for suspecting that the person may be subjected to torture, cruel, inhuman or degrading punishment or treatment in that state.
Today, the Republic of Armenia has decided the fate of V. Balandin: namely, to extradite the person to a state that is subject to the Putin regime and whose legal punishment is the death penalty.
We condemn the approach of the Armenian authorities and demand that this inhuman decision be immediately reversed.
It should be recalled that criminal proceedings have been initiated against V. Balandin in Belarus under Article 211 of the Criminal Code. The criminal case was initiated because V. Balandin participated in actions of disobedience. V. Balandin has been in custody in Armenia since March 10, 2024, and on April 10, the Prosecutor General’s Office of the Republic of Armenia received a petition for V. Balandin’s extradition.
Already on May 31, 2024, the Prosecutor General’s Office of the Republic of Armenia made a decision to allow the extradition, noting that the Prosecutor General’s Office of the Republic of Belarus has provided guarantees for the protection of Balandin’s rights and freedoms stipulated by international treaties.
In other words, the Prosecutor General’s Office of the Republic of Armenia, ignoring the facts of massive and inhuman violations of human rights in Belarus (there are hundreds of reports, statements by international organizations, structures, and individual states), takes as a basis the obviously false, baseless assurances of the Prosecutor General’s Office of the dictatorial regime about guarantees and makes a decision to allow the extradition.
The efforts of the HCAV to defend V. Balandin in domestic instances were unsuccessful: both the Courts of Appeal and the Court of Cassation rejected our complaints. The Republic of Armenia believes that leaving a person’s life and fate at the discretion of a dictatorial state is unacceptable. We declare that the decision of the Prosecutor General’s Office of the Republic of Armenia to extradite V. Balandin, who is being illegally pursued by the dictatorial regime of Belarus, following the meeting of the Prosecutors General of Belarus and the Republic of Armenia in Yerevan on October 3, 2024, is illegal; it was made solely as a result of some political arrangements, which are inherently devoid of any human value and contradict the obligations of the Republic of Armenia as a member state of the Council of Europe. The authorities of the Republic of Armenia will bear direct responsibility for the violation of V. Balandin’s rights in Belarus, including torture, the death penalty, or possible torture, deterioration of health, other accidents or suicide while in a Belarusian prison.
