[1/2] ‘Greetings! My name is Mikalai Dziadok. I am writing this letter to all those for whom the words 'justice', 'humanism' and 'human dignity' are not an empty phrase. On February 26 this year, I was sentenced under Part 1 of Article 411 of the Criminal Code to one year of imprisonment. The title of this article is ‘Willful disobedience to the requirements of the administration of a correctional facility’. The sentence was handed down in prison just five days before the end of my previous term, 4 years and 6 months. I noted that I received the maximum penalty under this article. In 2012, a former political prisoner Zmitser Dashkevich was convicted under the same article. What was my ‘crime’? 16 disciplinary violations in almost 2 years in Prison No. 4, in particular; wearing a tracksuit, talking to inmates in neighbouring cells and walking around the cell after 10 p.m. It is also important to note that for each of the 16 violations I was reprimanded, either receiving a warning or five to ten days in a punishment cell, thus serving sixty days in a punishment cell of this prison alone. The Constitution, the Criminal Code and the Correctional Code of Belarus declare a lot of good principles and rights, but they are trampled into the mud when Article 411 of the Criminal Code is in action. It allows them to send a person to a correctional colony for one year (or two years under the second part of this article), for wearing or not wearing certain clothes, or for a conversation with your cellmate. Is there such a terrible and absurd legal norm elsewhere in the world?! Initially, Article 411 of the Criminal Code was introduced to deal with crime bosses in penitentiaries and the internal prison laws inherited by Belarus from the Soviet era. Today, however, these internal laws are almost universally defeated by the administrations of prisons and colonies, and the article was and is increasingly being used against political prisoners and other inmates fighting for their rights. The very wording of the article opens up a space for moral violence and violation of human dignity. Here is an example: a prison inspector spits on the ground and gives a convict a mop to clean it up. The latter refuses. Four such refusals are enough for criminal prosecution! One of the convicts told me this story, and even if it is not quite true or exaggerated - everything in it is within the law, and this is the worst thing about it. In full accordance with the law, a prisoner can be put in prison for four refusals to perform work that humiliates him! I do not know of even a single case of acquittal under Article 411. In general, human rights violations and abuses in Belarusian prisons have reached such a scale that they have become a system and a habit, they should be described in a whole book, not a single letter! However, I don't want to be overambitious in this appeal, and so I will focus on the effects of Article 411. This scope for arbitrary actions of prison administrations is created by the Interior Ministry’s Internal Rules of Conduct (IRC), which should be followed by each convict. However, convicts are not familiarised with the entire rules, only part of them, and they are told that the rest of the document is ‘for official use’. This does not prevent the administration from demanding full observance of the rules by the convicts. The rules themselves are written in a manner that allows the punishment of anyone at any time for things such as: being unshaven, wearing dirty clothes or shoes, unbuttoned collars, improper greeting or not greeting a representative of the administration, not standing up in the presence of prison authorities and so on. Often violations reports are simply falsified, and then try proving that your shoes were actually clean! It is for such ‘violations’ that Belarusian political prisoners continue to be put in disciplinary segregation, secure housing unit and deprived of family visits. These prisoners include: Ihar Alinevich, Artsiom Prakapenka, Yauhen Vaskovich and Mikalai Statkevich.