A/HRC/38/51 launched against the head of the Union, Henadz Fiadynich. In fact, the case centres around money received from one of the Union’s European partners. The offices of the Union were searched in August 2017. 64. The Special Rapporteur notes the recommendations made by the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination during its 2017 consideration of the combined periodic reports of Belarus that Belarus consult and engage in dialogue with civil society organizations concerned with human rights protection, in particular those working to combat racial discrimination (CERD/C/BLR/CO/20-23). The Special Rapporteur hopes that the above-mentioned recommendation will be taken up by the authorities. E. Torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment 65. In Belarus, ill-treatment amounting to torture is a systemic tool that serves the overall oppressive legal framework. Domestic law still does not provide for a definition of torture, despite repeated calls for action in that regard by human rights mechanisms, including the Committee against Torture. The Special Rapporteur hopes that the consideration of the fifth periodic report of Belarus by the Committee against Torture in April and May 2018 will be instrumental in advancing official acknowledgement of the issue and the much awaited legal and practical measures to prevent torture and illtreatments and repair their effects. 66. There were numerous reports of ill-treatment and violence, some of them possibly amounting to torture, during State-guided repression of the 2017 rallies. A number of victims of ill-treatment by the police submitted complaints. The Special Rapporteur recalls that, in the absence of a definition of the crime of torture in the Criminal Code, individuals can only resort to the provision dealing with abuse of authority contained therein. 67. According to reports received by the Special Rapporteur, the prosecutors’ offices in Minsk and in other cities appeared to have looked into allegations of ill-treatment during the rallies of March and May 2017. An emblematic case concerns Sirahei Tkachenka, who was beaten by the police on 9 May. His request to launch a criminal investigation was rejected. Subsequently, he appealed successfully to the local Prosecutor’s Office. The Prosecutor decided that the investigation had been conducted in an unlawful manner, and requested further information from the local department of the Investigative Committee. Similarly, in the case of Aleh Bahdanau, the Minsk Prosecutor’s Office decided, in December 2017, to overturn an earlier decision of the Investigative Committee to discontinue a criminal investigation into the cause of Mr. Bahdanau’s death. However, that approach does not appear to be uniformly applied: the Prosecutor’s Office of Piersamajski District, Minsk, upheld the decision of the local department of the Investigative Committee not to launch a criminal investigation into reports of ill-treatment by the police of Aliaksei Loika, a Viasna Human Rights Centre lawyer. The Special Rapporteur hopes that the Prosecutor’s Office will continue its attempts to carefully monitor all the activities and decisions of all the departments of the Investigative Committee, the mandate of which is extremely wide-reaching, 22 and will support victims’ claims for justice, including those emanating from human rights defenders. 68. A year after the March 2017 events, the Special Rapporteur received similar allegations of random acts of violence and ill-treatment by police and prison officials in the context of the March 2018 Freedom Day rallies. 23 In another case of uninvestigated violence, a Belsat journalist was allegedly beaten by four police officers in February 2018 while covering local elections. In response to the pervasive nature of ill-treatment and to the absence of State policies to tackle it, Viasna Human Rights Centre launched a social media campaign to give visibility to the issue. 22 23 See A/72/493, para. 30. See http://www.omct.org/human-rights-defenders/urgent-interventions/belarus/2018/03/d24793/. 11