Belarus sentences Nobel laureate Bialiatski to 10 years in prison

Bialiatski and three high figures of the human rights centre he based convicted of financing anti-government protests.

Ales Bialiatski, head of Belarusian Viasna rights group, stands in a defendant's cage throughout a court docket session in Minsk, Belarus, on November 2, 2011 [File: Sergei Grits/AP Photo]

A Belarusian court docket has sentenced Ales Bialiatski, Belarus’s high human rights advocate and one of many winners of the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize, to 10 years in jail.

Bialiatski and three different high figures of the Viasna Human Rights Centre he based had been charged with financing protests and smuggling cash on Friday.

Exiled Belarusian opposition chief Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya mentioned Bialiatski and different activists sentenced in the identical trial had been unfairly convicted, calling the decision “appalling”.

“We should do the whole lot to struggle towards this shameful injustice & free them,” she mentioned on Twitter.

Prosecutors had requested the Minsk court docket to offer Bialiatski, who denied the costs, a 12-year sentence.

Belarusian state information company Belta confirmed the sentences.

Poland’s prime minister denounced the sentencing.

“Immediately’s verdict is yet one more outrageous choice of a Belarusian court docket lately,” Mateusz Morawiecki mentioned in a Fb put up.

“The (Belarusian) authorities have repeatedly tried to silence him, however Ales Bialiatski by no means conceded in his struggle for human rights and democracy in Belarus.”

Aged 60, Bialiatski is likely one of the most outstanding of a whole lot of Belarusians who had been jailed throughout a crackdown on anti-government protests that erupted after longtime chief Alexander Lukashenko was declared the winner of the 2020 presidential election and continued into 2021.

The costs towards Bialiatski and his colleagues, who had been arrested in 2021, had been additionally linked to Viasna’s provision of cash to political prisoners and assist in the direction of their authorized charges.

“The allegations towards our colleagues are linked to their human rights exercise, the Viasna human rights centre’s provision of assist to the victims of politically motivated persecution,” Viasna has mentioned of the case.

German Overseas Minister Annalena Baerbock slammed the costs and proceedings towards Bialiatski, and co-defendants Valentin Stefanovich and Vladimir Labkovich, as a “farce”, saying they had been being judged “merely for his or her years-long struggle for the rights, dignity and freedom of the folks of Belarus”.

Bialiatski was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize final October for his work on human rights and democracy, sharing it with the Russian rights group Memorial and Ukraine’s Heart for Civil Liberties.

In an interview with Al Jazeera in December, Bialiatski’s spouse Natalia Pinchuk mentioned: “All of us realise how vital and dangerous the mission of civil rights defenders is, particularly within the tragic time of Russia’s aggression towards Ukraine.

“Ales isn't the one one to be in jail; 1000's of Belarusians, tens of 1000's of those that are repressed, unjustly imprisoned for his or her civic actions and beliefs, are in jail, and a whole lot of 1000's have been pressured to flee the nation for the mere motive that they needed to reside in a democratic state.”