Laureate of the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize, activist Ales Bialiatski, 60, has been imprisoned in Belarus, ruled by the iron fist of dictator Aleksandr Lukachenko, since July 2021. He is one of the most renowned defenders of human rights in his country. .
Bialiatski founded the Viasna Human Rights Center in the 1990s as a response to the repression sponsored by Lukachenko. Since then, he has been prosecuted several times by the Moscow-allied regime.
The organization supports people who participate in demonstrations and family members of political prisoners. Based in the capital Minsk, it has around 200 members across the country, according to official information.
Bialiatski had previously been arrested, in November 2011, when he was sentenced to four-and-a-half years in prison on charges of tax evasion – which human rights organizations claim was just a forged excuse to incarcerate him. He was released after three years in June 2014.
This time, he is subject to a similar charge. According to the International Federation for Human Rights, he was detained for alleged illegal movements of money across the border. Two other members of Viasna are targets of similar smuggling charges and are also awaiting trial – justice, however, is aligned with the regime.
Lukachenko, a former manager of a Soviet collective farm, won the 1994 free presidential election but has since embarked on an authoritarian enterprise in the former Soviet republic.
A few weeks ago, Viasna sent a statement to the UN Human Rights Council warning of the possible deterioration of Bialiatski’s health. In the text, the organization claims that he is being kept in a kind of special corridor, in the semi-basement, with poor access to light and without access to correspondence with family members.
The NGO also says that Belarusian authorities are systematically detaining anyone exercising the right to freedom of expression – in the last month alone, 387 were reportedly arrested.
“Ales Bialiatski dedicated his life to promoting democracy and peaceful development in his home country,” the Norwegian Nobel Committee said during the justification for the award on Friday (7). “Despite enormous personal difficulties, he did not give an inch in his fight for human rights in Belarus.”
The committee also publicly called for the activist’s freedom and criticized the repression promoted by the Belarus dictatorship. The prize was triple: the Memorial, a human rights group from Russia, and the Center for Civil Liberties of Ukraine shared the laurel with the activist.
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