The Parliament adopted the joint resolution on Belarus by 504 votes to 4 , with 55 abstentions. EPP, S&D, Renew, Greens/EFA, and ECR voted overwhelmingly in favour; most PfE members backed the text while a minority abstained; ESN and NI were split; most of The Left abstained. As a non-legislative own-initiative resolution, the text carries no direct legal force, but it represents Parliament's formal political position and is intended to press the Council and Commission to maintain pressure on the Lukashenko government and pursue the release of political prisoners. The substantive debate centred on how to characterise the role of the United States in securing prisoner releases and whether the EU should shift toward re-engagement with Minsk. Three amendments from the right — proposing to acknowledge US-brokered releases, to encourage continued US humanitarian diplomacy, and to call on the EU to re-engage with Belarusian authorities — were all rejected by the mainstream coalition of EPP, S&D, Renew, and Greens/EFA. The margins were decisive: the most direct re-engagement call fell by 344 votes. The mainstream groups judged that neither crediting the US sanctions-relief approach nor calling for EU re-engagement was appropriate for this resolution. Two consensual amendments — adding a recital and an operative paragraph condemning the systematic use of Article 411 of the Belarusian Criminal Code to extend political prisoners' sentences indefinitely — passed with near-unanimity, revealing broad agreement across the chamber on the core condemnation of Minsk's practices. An oral amendment related to the framing of the deterioration of Belarus's political prisoner situation also carried, with most of the centre and right voting in favour while much of S&D and The Left abstained.
Source🔗 Open source ↗