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

Ales Bialiatski, Belarus’s 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 top figures of the Viasna human rights centre he founded were convicted of financing anti-government protests. They were arrested and jailed after massive protests over a 2020 election that gave authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko a new term in office.

Lukashenko — in office since 1994 — has suppressed opposition and cracked down on independent news media. The 2020 protests persisted for several months, the largest wave of protest to hit Belarus, and authorities took harsh action.

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

The charges against Bialiatski and his colleagues were connected to Viasna’s provision of money to political prisoners and helping pay their legal fees.

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

Democracy advocate 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, charges his supporters said where politically motivated. 

Belarusian opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, who has been in exile in Poland and then Lithuania since the 2020 election, denounced the court verdict on Friday as “appalling.” She identified the other defendants in Minsk as being Valiantsin Stefanovic and Uladzimir Labkovich.

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

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