Yuri Bandazhevsky

Yuri Bandazhevsky (born on January 9 1957 in Belarus), former director of the Medical Institute in Gomel (Belarus), is a scientist working on sanitary consequences of the Chernobyl disaster. He was the first to create an institute in Belarus, in 1989, specially dedicated to scientific work on the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.

Bandazhevsky studied at the Medical Institute of Grodno and became a specialist of anatomic pathology. He supported his doctoral thesis in 1987, a year after the Chernobyl disaster, and named director of the Central Laboratory of Scientific Research. In 1990, he was named director of the Gomel Medical Institute.

On June 2001 Yuri Bandazhevski was sentenced to eight years imprisonment on the grounds that he had received bribes from students' parents. The institute's Deputy Director, Vladimir Ravkov, also received an eight-year prison sentence. Bandazhevski's lawyer claimed that he had been convicted on the basis of two testimonies made under duress, without any material evidence. According to many human rights groups Dr. Bandazhevski was a prisoner of conscience. Amnesty International has stated on their website "His conviction was widely believed to be related to his scientific research into the Chernobyl catastrophe and his open criticism of the official response to the Chernobyl nuclear reactor disaster on people living in the region of Gomel." His arrest came soon after he published reports critical of the official research being conducted into the Chernobyl incident.

Yuri Bandazhevsky was released on parole from prison on August 5, 2005, and prohibited for five months of leaving Belarus. He was afterward invited by the mayor of Clermont-Ferrand, in France, to work at the university and at the hospital on Chernobyl's consequences. Clermont-Ferrand has been since 1977 linked to Gomel where Bandhazevsky used to work. In France, he is notably supported by the Commission de recherche et d'information indépendantes sur la radioactivité (CRIIRAD).