Ajit Karn
Ales Bialiatski, who won the Nobel Peace Prize and worked for human rights, was sentenced to 10 years in jail in Belarus on Friday (March 3). He was found guilty of funding protests and other crimes. Human rights groups say the case was politically motivated.
Bialiatski, who is 60 years old, helped start the human rights group Viasna. He has been at the centre of protests in Belarus since 2020, when long-time leader Alexander Lukashenko was re-elected as President. Viasna took the lead in helping those who were arrested during the protests with legal and financial help. In 2021, Bialiatski and two other people from his group were arrested.
Last October, he shared the Nobel Peace Prize with the Russian rights group Memorial and the Center for Civil Liberties in Ukraine for his work on human rights and democracy. During the Nobel ceremony, Bialiatski was still in jail, so his wife accepted the award on his behalf.
Since the 1980s, he has worked for democracy.
Bialiatski has been protesting for democracy since the 1980s. He is a scholar of Belarussian literature, a school teacher, and the head of a museum. In the early 1980s, he worked hard to get Belarus to break away from the Soviet Union. He did this by setting up anti-Soviet protests all over the country.
Belarus got its independence in 1990, but its hopes of becoming a strong democracy didn’t last long. Alexander Lukashenko became the first president of Belarus in 1994. This was the country’s first and, according to experts, only free election after it became independent. Since then, he has been president.
Since then, protests have been held against Lukashenko’s government. The mass opposition protests of 1996 were among the first. Report says that Ales Bialiatski helped start the Viasna human rights organisation during these protests. The group’s goal is to help political prisoners and their families financially and legally. Viasna also wrote about how the government mistreated political prisoners.
In jail from 2011 to 2014
Ales Bialiatski has been locked up before, so this is not the first time. Report says that he was put in jail from 2011 to 2014 on a charge of tax evasion related to Viasna’s funding, which he denied.
In 2021, when protests against the government broke out after Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko was once again named the winner of a presidential election in 2020, he was arrested again. The opposition said the elections were rigged, so they went out into the streets to protest.
Lukashenko, who is close to Putin, has been in the news lately because he lets Russian troops use Belarus to launch missiles at Ukraine and use the country for troop movement and logistics.
A weak argument
According to Report, Bialiatski and two other people from Viasna were put on trial in January of this year for “smuggling by an organised group” and “financing of group actions that grossly violated public order.” Human rights groups and observers from all over the world have been very critical of the trial. Many of them have called it a “sham.”
Amnesty International called it “a clear act of injustice that shows the government is trying to punish them for their work.”
Bialiatski had denied all of the charges against him, so the prosecutors asked the court to give him a 12-year sentence. Bialiatski got 10 years in prison, while his two other co-defendants got 7 and 9 years in prison, respectively. The convicts were also given big fines that added up to more than $100,000. They will also have to pay back nearly $300,000 that the court says they got through illegal means.
Reactions
The prison sentence has drawn criticism and anger both inside and outside of Belarus. According to Report, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, a Belarusian opposition leader who lives in exile, said that Bialiatski and other activists who were sentenced in the same trial were wrongly convicted. She called the verdict “appalling.”
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On the day before the sentencing, 23 human rights groups put out a statement criticising the Belarussian government and calling for all political prisoners to be set free. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the European Platform for Democratic Elections (EPDE), and ARTICLE 19 are among the groups that signed the letter.
Viasna has had a lot of negative things to say about the whole situation. Viasna said in a statement after the conviction, “Today, solidarity actions are happening in other countries to protest the illegal conviction and criminalization of human rights defence activities in Belarus.”
