Swiss court finds former SOBR officer Haravski guilty of kidnapping Krasouski, gives him two years suspended

The cantonal court of St. Gallen in Switzerland found Yury Haravski, a former officer of Belarus's SOBR special police unit, guilty of kidnapping the businessman Anatol Krasouski and sentenced him to two years in prison, suspended. The ruling was handed down on 26 October 2026.

As reported by the Viasna human rights centre, which Belarusian authorities have designated an "extremist formation", the court found Haravski guilty specifically of kidnapping Krasouski. According to a report by one Belarusian news outlet, the events in question took place in 1999.

According to the politician Andrei Sannikau, Haravski gave a confession and received two years suspended.

The judge stated that Haravski knew in advance about the detention and killing of Hanchar and Krasouski. The court thus believed his testimony, but could not change its earlier decision on Hanchar: it left in force the acquittal in the case of the kidnapping of Viktar Hanchar, because it had not allowed the spouses to challenge that part of the verdict.

Haravski named those who gave the orders. In his testimony he named Aliaksandr Lukashenka and Viktar Sheiman as the ones who ordered the kidnappings. He said this in court in Switzerland.

After the publication of Haravski's interview, Lukashenka instructed the Investigative Committee to carry out a check in connection with this information.

Sannikau wrote that the trial and the verdict confirm the facts and conclusions of the 2004 report "Missing Persons of Belarus" by PACE rapporteur Christos Pourgourides. In his view, the verdict strengthened the legal basis for the accusations against Belarus's senior officials and security structures.

Sannikau acknowledges that the leniency of the sentence may encourage participants in violent crimes in Belarus to go to the law enforcement bodies of other states with confessions. For international human rights defenders, the ruling has become an important precedent.

Sannikau noted that there are currently no direct mechanisms for holding heads of state accountable in the courts of other countries. In his words, it is rather a matter of an international reaction to facts of crimes against humanity proven in court.

He believes that democratic states should take into account the criminal nature, as he assesses it, of such authorities in their relations with them. As an example of a recent precedent, he named the trial of Nicolas Maduro in the United States.