Belarus sentences Nobel Peace Prize winner Ales Bialiatski to 10 years in jail

Issued on: 03/03/2023 – 11:13

Belarus on Friday handed a 10-year jail time period to veteran activist Ales Bialiatski, a Nobel Prize winner and founding father of the ex-Soviet authoritarian nation’s most distinguished rights group.

Bialiatski was within the dock with two allies after they had been jailed within the aftermath of historic demonstrations towards the disputed 2020 re-election of Belarus’s strongman President Alexander Lukashenko.

They had been accused of smuggling money into Belarus to allegedly fund opposition actions, based on rights group Viasna, that means Spring in Belarusian, which Bialiatski based in 1996. 

Viasna mentioned he had been handed a 10-year sentence, whereas co-defendants Valentin Stefanovich was given 9 years in jail and Vladimir Labkovich was jailed for seven.

Throughout a listening to in January final yr, all three pleaded not responsible.

Amnesty International has known as the trial a “blatant act of injustice” and “revenge for his or her activism”.

Bialiatski was among the many three co-recipients of final yr’s Nobel Peace Prize, alongside a Russian and Ukrainian human rights group. 

Bialiatski, 60, based Viasna shortly after Lukashenko grew to become the primary president of impartial Belarus in 1994. 

In 2011, Bialiatski was jailed for 3 years for tax evasion, in a transfer extensively seen as politically-motivated within the wake of an earlier presidential election claimed by Lukashenko.

‘Courageous’ rights defenders

Lukashenko, dubbed “Europe’s final dictator”, has dominated the nation with an iron first for practically three a long time.

He’s a staunch ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin and allowed Moscow to deploy troops to Ukraine from Belarus final February. 

Lukashenko has cracked down on the opposition motion, jailing his critics or pushing them into exile.

Belarus’s exiled opposition chief Svetlana Tikhanovskaya on Friday criticised the court docket’s resolution in what she known as a “faux trial”.

“We should do all the pieces to combat towards this shameful injustice and free them,” she mentioned on social media.

Prosecutors in Belarus are looking for a 19-year jail time period for Tikhanovskaya, who now lives in EU member Lithuania.

Tikhanovskaya — who claimed victory within the 2020 presidential election — faces a litany of costs together with excessive treason, “conspiracy to grab energy” and creating and main an extremist organisation.

Tikhanovskaya and her allies spearheaded rallies towards Lukashenko’s declare to a sixth time period in energy in elections denounced as fraudulent by the worldwide neighborhood.

She ran for the presidency rather than her husband, Sergei Tikhanovsky, a charismatic YouTube blogger who galvanised the opposition and coined a brand new insult for Lukashenko when he known as him a “cockroach”.

Authorities reduce his marketing campaign brief by arresting him on costs of violating public order. 

In 2021, he was discovered responsible of organising riots, inciting social hatred and different costs and sentenced to 18 years in jail.

(AFP)