Nobel Peace Prize winner Ales Bialiatski sentenced to 10 years in prison in Belarus

Ales Bialiatski, Belarus’ top human rights advocate and one of the winners of the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize, was sentenced to 10 years in prison in Minsk on Friday.

Bialiatski and three other key figures of the Viasna human rights center he founded were accused of financing anti-government protests. He was arrested and jailed after massive protests over the 2020 election that would give authoritarian president Alexander Lukashenko a new term.

Lukashenko – in office since 1994 – has suppressed the opposition and cracked down on the independent news media. The 2020 protests continued for months, the largest wave of protests to hit Belarus, and the authorities cracked down.

More than 35,000 people were arrested, and thousands were beaten by the police.

The charges against Bialiatski and his associates are linked to Viasna’s provision of money to political prisoners and helping to pay legal fees.

Bialiatski was honored by the Nobel committee in Oslo in October together with the Memorial of the Russian human rights organization and the Ukrainian human rights organization Center for Civil Liberties.

Advocate of democracy since the 80s

Bialiatski, 60, has been an advocate for democracy in Belarus since the 1980s and formed Viasna, which means “spring.”

He was previously imprisoned between 2011 and 2014 for tax evasion, a charge supporters say is politically motivated.

Belarusian opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, who has been exiled in Poland and then Lithuania since the 2020 elections, denounced Friday’s court ruling as “horrific”. He identified the other defendants in Minsk as Valiantsin Stefanovic and Uladzimir Labkovich.

“We must do everything to fight this injustice [and] free them,” Tsikhaouskaya wrote in a tweet.

Dzmitry Salauyou, who fled the country, was sentenced to eight years in prison in absentia.