After execution in Belarus, the body of a person sentenced to death is not released to relatives for burial, and the location of the body is not disclosed.
The Northern Cemetery in Minsk is one of the places where, according to human rights activists and the families of the convicted, the bodies of people executed under sentences of Belarusian courts were buried. It is likely that the bodies of those not released to their relatives after execution ended up there. It was here that Sviatlana Zhuk unsuccessfully searched for the burial place of her son Andrei, who was executed in 2010.
Andrei Zhuk was sentenced to the death penalty in July 2009. His mother, Sviatlana Zhuk, submitted an individual communication to the Committee requesting its urgent registration. The Committee accepted the communication for consideration, and the Republic of Belarus received a note from the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights about the registration of that communication. The Human Rights Committee's procedure requires that death sentences not be carried out while a case is under consideration. Nevertheless, the death sentence was carried out in March 2010—before the Committee completed its consideration of the complaint.
