Yuri Bandajevsky, a 47-year-old doctor specialising in the effects of nuclear radiation, was arrested in late 1999 and sentenced to eight years of hard labor in June 2001 on charges of corruption.

Having served half of his sentence, he has now been moved to a village in the western Grodno region in line with Belarussian law .

"Detention conditions are better than in jail but are nevertheless terrible. There is no hot water, cold water is regularly cut off," said his wife, Galina Bandajevskaya who was able to visit him.

The detainees are housed in former barracks, 10 to 12 people per room. They prepare their own food and can walk freely in the village and the forest and do their shopping," she told AFP.

"For him it's almost freedom. He even cried when he stepped out of the train and saw an officer without dog or rifle," she said.

But she said she doubted her husband would be able to work in those conditions.

"The entire system is designed to break the personality. He was transported in a locked car from Friday to Monday over 220 kilometers (130 miles) and his belongings were searched three times," she said.

Bandajevsky is well-known for his criticism of the Belarussian authorities, whom he accuses of irresponsibly managing the fallout of the Chernobyl catastrophe.

When the reactor in the Chernobyl nuclear power station exploded in April 1986 it released a huge cloud of radioactivity over a large part of Europe.

Nearly six million people continue to live in contaminated zones, according to UN figures.

Nearly 90 percent of Belarus, north of Ukraine where the Chernobyl explosion happened, was affected by radiation.

Bandajevsky ran a medical institute in Gomel, in southern Belarus, a few kilometres (miles) from the ill-fated Ukrainian nuclear power station and studied the effects of radiation on the health of residents of areas contaminated by the disaster.

His case has been taken up by Amnesty International, CRIIRAD (Commission of Independent Research and Information on Radioactivity), Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and other groups which have denounced Belarus' legal process as "iniquitous" and violating the rules of law.

TERRA.WIRE