A clever Belarusian man who lived illegally in the Czech Republic for 23 years remembered his political activism when police stopped him

Liberec, Czech Republic. Photo: wikimedia.org

The Regional Court in Ústí nad Labem (Liberec branch) denied international protection to a Belarusian citizen, ruling that he "exaggerates the importance of his person" for the Belarusian authorities, and that the true motive for his application was to legalize his stay in the Czech Republic. The decision was issued on July 18, 2025, and came into force. The applicant's name is not specified in the published text.

The man arrived by bus from Minsk to Prague in the spring of 2001 and has not left the Czech Republic since. For more than two decades, he lived illegally in the country.

The Belarusian first applied for asylum back in 2003 – he was rejected then. He filed a new application only in June 2024 – after he was stopped by the police and ordered to leave the country. In November 2024, he married a Czech citizen, took her surname, and two weeks later submitted documents for a residence permit as a family member of a Czech citizen.

To prove that he faced persecution in his homeland, the applicant presented the following political biography.

In 2017-2018, he followed Siarhei Tsikhanouski's blog. He called his parents in Belarus and persuaded them to vote for the opposition – first for Tsikhanouski, then for Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya. During conversations, he "spoke ill of" Lukashenka, and after the start of the war in Ukraine, he convinced his relatives that NATO was better than Belarus and explained the influence of propaganda to them. He also claimed that he persuaded "several people" that Lukashenka was a murderer and a criminal, and "supported opposition blogs" by increasing their viewership.

He linked the threat to the fact that all international calls are monitored: he allegedly heard "clicks and echoes" during conversations, and his parents said that they could no longer talk about politics on the phone. From this, he concluded that upon his return, he would be detained and forced to confess, and the very fact of his asylum application in Belarus would be equated to slandering the state or treason.

In an additional interview, the man admitted that in recent years he had not been politically active and had not participated in demonstrations – including the 2020 protests: he did not want to take risks, had no money, and no documents.

The applicant also tried to present two old criminal cases as political persecution. One was a suspended sentence in 1992 for complicity in theft. The second was a traffic accident case (he entrusted driving to a person without a license), which was closed in 2011 due to the statute of limitations.

The court agreed with the Ministry of Internal Affairs, which denied the applicant in January 2025. The decision recognizes that Belarus remains a repressive state towards real opponents of the regime, but the applicant himself does not belong to this category.

The court considered the wiretapping of his conversations unlikely: for Belarusian authorities, he is "at most a citizen who has been abroad for decades and about whom little is known," and the capabilities of special services to monitor are not limitless.

The court called the version that the police allegedly searched for him at his parents' house far-fetched: there was no reason to look for a person who had not been in the country for twenty years – especially if the authorities had indeed wiretapped his calls and knew that he was calling from abroad.

The true purpose of the application, the court concluded, was to legalize his stay in the Czech Republic, where the man now has a wife; for this, there is a law on the stay of foreigners, not the institution of political asylum. The application was rejected as unfounded.

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