Graduate Student Detained During Brazen Political Arrest

European Humanities University officials are calling on the authoritarian government of Belarus to release one of its students, who was detained Sunday along with a prominent journalist with whom she was traveling.

According to widespread news reports and the university, the commercial flight the student and the journalist were on was forced to land in Minsk, the capital of Belarus, and the journalist, Roman Protasevich, was promptly arrested. The actions were taken on the orders of Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko, the news reports said.

The student, Sofia Sapega, was detained along with Protasevich, her boyfriend. Sapega, a Russian citizen, is studying for her master’s degree in international law and European Union law at EHU, which is located in the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius.

“She was about to get back to Vilnius after spending vacation in Greece with her boyfriend, and she was about to take her defense of her master’s thesis in upcoming weeks,” said Maksimas Milta, a EHU spokesman. “From her groupmates and faculty members, there is only positive feedback about Sofia as a student -- her academic merits, but also in overall terms.”

EHU, a Belarusian university operating in exile in Lithuania, issued a statement Monday advocating for Sapega’s release and condemning her arrest “on groundless and made-up conditions.”

“The community of EHU categorically condemns the impunity of Belarusian authorities and demands the fulfillment of international obligations of Belarus as well as ensuring rights and freedoms of citizens, as provided in the Constitution of Belarus,” the university’s statement says. “We stay in solidarity with all illegally detained Belarusians and those under unprecedented political persecution. We protest against the unjustified detention of the member of EHU community Sofia Sapega.”

EHU also contacted the Russian embassy in Belarus, asking it to provide consular assistance to Sapega as a Russian citizen. On Monday, Russian foreign secretary Sergey Lavrov said the Russian Embassy had requested information about Sapega's case and consular access, according to the BBC.

Belarus’s Embassy in D.C. did not respond to a request from Inside Higher Ed to provide information on Sapega’s detention Monday.

Apart from Sapega, EHU officials say two other EHU students and two alumni are political prisoners in Belarus, whose president, Lukashenko, has frequently been described as “Europe’s last dictator.”

Students are among those who have been arrested in a crackdown on protesters who took to the street to challenge Belarus's August 2020 presidential elections, which were widely viewed as fraudulent by international observers.

At least 466 Belarusian students have been detained in retribution for their involvement in the protests, according to data from the Belarusian Students Association disseminated Monday by the human rights organization Amnesty International. Many were put under administrative detention and fined an average of 120 euros, or about $147, which, according to an Amnesty International press release, equates to a quarter of the average monthly salary in Belarus. At least 153 students have been expelled from their universities, 42 have become suspects in criminal cases and six have been sentenced to prison.

“Since September of last year, 78 students who were expelled from Belarusian universities or have experienced other forms of pressure from the regime were enrolled at EHU,” said Milta, the EHU spokesman. In addition, he said 16 scholars who lost their positions at public universities or were kicked out of Belarus’s Academy of Sciences since last summer have come to EHU.

EHU was founded in 1992 in Minsk and operated there until it was shut down in 2004 and relocated to Vilnius. Milta said 95 percent of the roughly 680 students are from Belarus.

Clare Robinson, advocacy director for Scholars at Risk, an organization that advocates for academic freedom globally, described EHU as “a much-needed and rare setup, and one that we would welcome seeing more of -- institutions existing in part to encourage those who are unable to study in their home countries to study across the border where it’s possible.”

Dan Davidson, a former board member for EHU who is active in Friends of EHU in the U.S., said the university "functions like a rigorous Western liberal arts institution over the border in Lithuania for the benefit of students and scholars. It plays a role not unlike the New School in New York in the 1930s, when increasing numbers of academics and scholars realized they needed to get out of Germany if they wanted to survive."

"EHU is in the middle of this not because it’s always and invariably tangled in every political scandal that comes along, but quite the opposite, because it is a very solid place where academic integrity matters," said Davidson, the president emeritus of the American Councils for International Education. "This young woman, quite apart from whose flight she was on or who her boyfriend is, she’s a serious student of international law and European Union law. She was another victim."