Human Rights House Foundation statement
HRC60 – Item 4 – Interactive Dialogue – Belarus Group of Independent Experts
19 September 2025
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Thank you, Vice-President.
We congratulate the Experts for their ground-breaking conference room paper. It concludes that senior state officials, including the Belarusian President, bear personal responsibility for directing the organised campaign of repression in Belarus, and for complicity in violations that may amount to crimes against humanity. The paper demonstrates how a range of state institutions, from the security services and police, to the judiciary and prison system, have worked together to maintain this repressive system, and documents the forced exile of up to 600,000 Belarusians.
Despite recent releases, more than 1,000 political prisoners still remain behind bars, among them prominent human rights defenders such as Ales Bialiatski, Uladzimir Labkovich, Valiantsin Stefanovic, Marfa Rabkova and Nasta Loika.
In the face of such impunity, international accountability is critical. The conference room paper maps various concrete pathways for justice at the national and international level, including corporate accountability. It also stresses victims’ rights to truth, remedy and reparation, underscoring important non-criminal forms of accountability that we should also be pursuing.
Vice-President.
Recent forced deportations of pardoned political prisoners further illustrate how exile is being weaponised. Given that the Rome Statute recognises deportation as a crime against humanity, and that some States have asked the ICC to examine this on jurisdictional grounds, we ask the Experts how such practices should be assessed?
Thank you.
