Belarus sentences Nobel laureate Bialiatsky to 10 years in prison | News

Bialiatsky and three other senior figures in the Human Rights Center he founded were found guilty of financing anti-government protests.

A Belarusian court has sentenced Alice Bialiatsky, Belarus’ top human rights defender and one of the winners of the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize, to 10 years in prison.

Bialiatsky and three other prominent figures in the Viasna Human Rights Center he founded were accused of financing the protests and smuggling money on Friday.

Exiled Belarusian opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya said that Bialyatsky and other activists sentenced in the same trial were unjustly convicted, calling the verdict “appalling”.

“We must do everything in our power to fight this shameful injustice and set them free,” she said on Twitter.

Prosecutors asked the Minsk court to sentence Bialiatsky to 12 years in prison, who denied the charges.

The Belarusian state news agency confirmed the verdicts.

Bialiatsky, 60, is one of the most prominent of hundreds of Belarusians imprisoned during a crackdown on anti-government protests that erupted after longtime leader Alexander Lukashenko was declared the winner of the 2020 presidential election and has continued into 2021.

The charges against Bialiatsky and his colleagues, who were arrested in 2021, were also related to Viasna providing money to political prisoners and helping them pay their legal fees.

Viasna said of the case: “The allegations against our colleagues are linked to their human rights activism, and the Viasna Center for Human Rights’ provision of assistance to victims of politically motivated persecution.”

German Foreign Minister Analina Baerbock slammed the charges and proceedings against Bialiatsky, co-defendants Valentin Stefanovic and Vladimir Lapkovich, as a “farce”, saying they were being judged “simply for their years-long struggle for the rights, dignity and freedom of the detained people of Belarus”.

Bialiatsky was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize last October for his work on human rights and democracy, shared with the Russian Rights Memorial Group and the Ukrainian Center for Civil Liberties.

In an interview with Al Jazeera in December, Bialiatsky’s wife, Natalia Pinchuk, said: “We all know how important and dangerous the job of civil rights defenders is, especially in the tragic period of Russian aggression against Ukraine.

“Isn’t he not the only one languishing in prison; thousands of Belarusians, tens of thousands of those who were unjustly oppressed and imprisoned for their actions and civic beliefs, are in prison, and hundreds of thousands were forced to flee the country simply because they want to live in a democratic state.”