<h6><strong>Eduardo González</strong></h6> <h4><strong>The Congress has urged the government, at the proposal of the Socialist Parliamentary Group, to reject the legitimacy of the recent presidential elections in Belarus, to support "the Belarusian opposition and civil society in their cause for a democratic transition in the country," and to demand the withdrawal of Russian nuclear weapons deployed in the country.</strong></h4> The non-legislative motion, presented on February 7, approved on February 24 by the Foreign Affairs Committee, and published this week in the Official Gazette of Congress, recalls that President Aleksandr Lukashenko's candidacy obtained 86 percent of the votes in the presidential elections held on January 26, which were "criticized by the international community" and described as a "farce" by the European Union. Lukashenko, who has been in power since 1994, thus secures his seventh term. The motion recalls that President Lukashenko's government "is recognized as one of the most repressive in the world." Currently, it continues, there are more than 1,250 political prisoners in the country, many of them in unacceptable conditions, and the Report of the Committee against Torture adopted at the 79th session of the UN General Assembly concluded that "the Belarusian authorities practice torture systematically and with impunity on their territory." Furthermore, the motion continues, the Lukashenko regime has supported and participated in the Russian invasion of Ukraine. "In exchange for funding, Belarus has become another instrument of Vladimir Putin's regime's foreign policy," it denounces. "It was from Belarusian territory that the Russian army launched the attempted invasion of Kyiv in February 2022, and since then, Russia has used the country as a support base for its war of aggression, as denounced by the Government of Ukraine and the European Union, among others," it adds. In March 2023, according to the non-legislative proposal, Russia installed tactical nuclear weapons on Belarusian territory, including, according to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), nuclear warheads for Iskander-M missiles, which can reach targets 500 kilometers away. Therefore, the non-legislative proposal approved by Congress urges the government to "reject the legitimacy of the 2025 Belarusian presidential elections for not meeting minimum international standards for a democratic process," to support "the Belarusian opposition and civil society in their cause for a democratic transition in the country," and to back "the decisions of the European Council to sanction individuals responsible for the perpetuation of autocracy in Belarus and the repression of the opposition, civil society, and the media." It also calls for the Belarusian government to "end the practices of torture" and "the impunity with which they are carried out," the release of "all political prisoners," and the beginning of "a democratic transition culminating in the organization of fair, free, and transparent elections." Finally, it urges the Spanish government to "denounce the Belarusian government's support for Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine and demand the withdrawal of nuclear weapons from the country." The text was approved as such. There was only one amendment, by the far-right group Vox, which attempted to transform this denunciation of the Belarusian regime into a denunciation of the regimes of Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua (with no justification other than the well-known "technical improvement") and to remove the expression "and political prisoners."
