Calls for EU to impose sanctions on Belarus after disputed elections

The EU is facing calls to impose sanctions on Alexander Lukashenko after a violent police crackdown on demonstrators in cities across Belarus following Sunday’s disputed elections.

The Polish MEP Robert Biedroń, who chairs the European parliament’s Belarus delegation, said the EU needed to rethink its policy towards Belarus’s president of 26 years. “We should introduce sanctions on Belarusian officials responsible for grave violations of human rights and fundamental rights,” he said.

“There must be a price that Lukashenko is paying for his violations of human rights and fundamental freedoms. Without this price paid by Lukashenko, nothing will change in Belarus.”

Official results on Monday showed that Lukashenko won 80.23% of the vote, enabling him to claim a sixth term in office and extend his decades-long grip on power. His main rival Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, who had drawn large crowds at rallies and officially took 9.9% of the vote, said the election had been rigged.

Biedroń said the groundswell of support for the opposition was “a strong signal” to the EU to rethink its policy towards Belarus, including finding new ways to support NGOs and civil society. “It’s our responsibility as the European Union and friends of Belarus to give strong support to the opposition and friends of civil society.”

In 2016 the EU lifted most sanctions against the Lukashenko regime, citing “significant, even if limited” steps in the right direction, following the release of some political prisoners.

Andrei Sannikov, who campaigns for democracy in Belarus from exile in neighbouring Poland, said that had been a grave mistake. “It was encouragement for Lukashenko to continue with his policy to use violence against peaceful demonstrations. It meant impunity because there is no justice in Belarus, no independent judiciary.”

Sannikov, a former presidential candidate who was beaten unconscious and jailed for 16 months after running in the 2010 elections, called for EU sanctions on the Belarusian leader and key officials, including those involved in “falsified election committees”.

“I expect more people in the streets, I expect more violence if Lukashenko is not stopped,” Sannikov said. “Stop all the financial aid, start sanctioning everything. They [the EU] do have instruments and they do know how to react, show some political will.”

Finding the necessary unanimity on sanctions – if they are proposed – is not guaranteed. On a visit to the Belarusian capital, Minsk, in June, Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, called for remaining sanctions on Belarus to be dropped, an approach that could spell tensions with Poland, part of the Visegrád group of countries alongside Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

Following Sunday’s police crackdown, the Warsaw government called for an emergency EU summit to discuss the situation in Belarus. EU sources say that is unlikely, but Belarus is expected to feature at an EU leader summit pencilled in for 24-25 September – a meeting intended to discuss a growing list of economic and foreign policy issues thrown off the agenda by coronavirus, including EU-China and EU-Turkey relations.

“The next [European Council] summit is set for September. The agenda will be determined in due course in the run-up to the meeting,” a Brussels source said.

The European council president, Charles Michel, tweeted on Monday: “Violence against protesters is not the answer. #Belarus. Freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, basic human rights must be upheld.”

An official EU statement by the EU foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, and its enlargement commissioner, Olivér Várhelyi, echoed these words, condemning elections for being “marred with disproportionate and unacceptable state violence against peaceful protesters”.

The two officials criticised the violence and called for the release of those detained on Sunday night. “We will continue to closely follow the developments in order to assess how to further shape the EU’s response and relations with Belarus in view of the developing situation,” the statement said.

Related: 'It's outrageous': Belarus election result sparks night of defiance and violence

Even before Brussels had issued any formal response, critics damned the EU’s approach. “EU silence and passivity on the stifling of democracy in Belarus is unconscionable,” said Estonia’s former president Toomas Hendrik Ilves. “Statements of ‘deep concern’ will do nothing. Time to suspend all EU activities in Belarus that do not directly help its citizens and to sanction all decision-makers in the Lukashenka regime.”

Nigel Gould-Davies, a former British ambassador to Belarus now at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, said: “Europe needs to make it very clear that they stand in solidarity with the basic goal of the Tikhanovskaya campaign. They should make it absolutely clear and unequivocal.”

He compared the situation to the 1989 revolutions across Europe that brought down communist regimes, and said those countries should be particularly supportive of the aspirations of Belarusians.

Additional reporting by Shaun Walker in Budapest