Sept 15 (Reuters) - U.S. envoy John Coale, tasked by President Donald Trump with negotiating the release of political prisoners in Belarus, returned to Minsk on Tuesday for his first talks in six months with President Alexander Lukashenko.
The Telegram channel of Lukashenko's administration published a photo of Coale arriving for the talks.
Coale opened negotiations last year with Lukashenko, a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, and has succeeded in winning the release of hundreds of prisoners
in return for the easing of U.S. sanctions against Belarus.
But human rights group Viasna says the former Soviet state still holds more than 900 political prisoners. Lukashenko rejects that description and describes the people in question as lawbreakers and "bandits".
The exiled Belarus opposition has welcomed Coale's diplomacy as a vital humanitarian intervention, but says Lukashenko is arresting new prisoners in place of those who walk free.
"It's essentially a pure trade. An exchange is taking place — hostages for a change in sanctions — but this doesn't alter the fundamental nature of the Belarusian regime," human rights campaigner Ales Bialiatski, who was himself freed from jail last year and deported, told Reuters last week.
"While I am glad to be free ... the machinery of repression keeps running. Every week we see new political prisoners and new methods of repression."
U.N. experts said on Tuesday that they had found "systematic" violations of international human rights obligations at every stage of the judicial process in Belarus — from the moment of arrest through detention, conviction and supervision after release.
They cited arbitrary arrests, torture, denial of legal safeguards, closed trials and continued harassment of former detainees.
The Belarus mission to the Geneva-based U.N. Human Rights Council did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
(Reporting by Reuters in Moscow and Olivia Le Poidevin in Geneva; writing by Mark Trevelyan in London; Editing by Andrew Heavens)
