The Governing Council of the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) has unanimously adopted a resolution on the case of Viktor Gonchar, a member of the Thirteenth Supreme Soviet of Belarus, who disappeared, together with his friend, Anatoly Krasovsky, on 16 September 1999.

In the resolution, which was adopted unanimously, the Council recalls, among other, the following:

• The investigation into the disappearances of Mr. Gonchar and Mr. Krasovsky after their abduction has thus far yielded no results, and the authorities have consistently refuted the conclusions of a report by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe into disappearances for allegedly political reasons in Belarus (Pourgourides report), which linked senior officials to the disappearances; the evidence collected by Mr. Pourgourides to this effect includes a handwritten document from the then police chief, General Lapatik (the authenticity of which the Belarusian authorities have acknowledged), in which General Lapatik accuses Mr. V. Sheyman, then Secretary of the Belarusian Security Council, of having ordered the killing of Mr. Zakharenko, a former Minister of the Interior, and states that the order was carried out by a special task force (SOBR unit) commanded by Colonel Pavlishenko, with the assistance of the then Minister of the Interior, Mr. Sivakov, who provided Colonel Pavlishenko with an official pistol, temporarily removed from SIZO-1 prison, for the execution; the same method was reportedly used in the executions of Mr. Gonchar and Mr. Krasovsky;
• In an interview President Lukashenko gave on 10 June 2009 to the Russian newspaper Zavtra, he stated that the cases of Mr. Gonchar and Mr. Krasovsky “were murders for business reasons; they had to buy or sell something and failed to stick to their promises, so they were killed, as is usual in ‘half-bandit’ circles; traces of a murderer have recently been found in Germany”; the German authorities have nevertheless denied this; moreover, Mrs. Krasovsky has denied that her husband had any business problems;
• In July and August 2010, a documentary entitled “The Nation’s Godfather” was aired on a Russian TV channel and was also available in Belarus; the film dealt inter alia with the involvement of State authorities in the disappearance of politicians, including Mr. Gonchar; no response has been received to an application made to the Prosecutor General to investigate the evidence presented in the documentary.

The IPU Governing Council also notes that:

• in April 2012, the United Nations Human Rights Committee established under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights issued its decision on the merits of the application filed by Mrs. Krasovsky and her daughter regarding the disappearance of Mr. Krasovsky;

And consideres that:

• The Human Rights Committee concluded that Belarus had violated its obligation to investigate properly and take appropriate remedial action regarding Mr. Krasovsky’s disappearance and requested Belarus to provide the victims with an effective remedy, including a thorough and diligent investigation and prosecution and punishment of the perpetrators, that the Human Rights Committee further required Belarus to provide adequate information concerning the results of the investigation, as well as adequate compensation to the authors of the complaint, and that Belarus was given 180 days by the Human Rights Committee to submit information about the measures taken pursuant to its decision,

In the concluding part of the document, the IPU Governing Council:

• Regrets that the authorities have not replied to the request by the Committee on the Human Rights of Parliamentarians to conduct a visit to Belarus;
• Recalls that the decision by the United Nations Human Rights Committee in the case of Mr. Krasovsky confirms its own long-standing concerns about the absence of an effective investigation into both disappearances and the secrecy in which the investigation has been shrouded from the beginning; wishes to be informed of the measures taken to comply with the decision and to ascertain if the authorities have likewise informed Mr. Gonchar’s family, as the United Nations Human Rights Committee has required them to do in the case of Mr. Krasovsky’s family, about the results of the investigation;
• Engages the authorities to leave no stone unturned in shedding full light on this crime, notably by thoroughly investigating the many leads and concerns that have emerged thus far, in particular in the report of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, and is therefore keen to know how the investigation plan has been addressing these leads and concerns.

The complete text of the IPU resolution can be found in the documents section.