by Eugene Chudnovsky, March 04, 2023
On Friday, a court in Belarus handed down a 10-year prison term to Ales Bialiatski, winner of the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize. Bialiatski, 60, is a founder of the Viasna (Spring) Human Rights Centre that has been monitoring presidential elections and aiding political prisoners since 1996. He was imprisoned for funding political protests.
Bialiatski, who holds a doctorate in Belarusian literature, has participated in the pro-democracy movement since the early 1980s. In the 1990s, he was a director of the Literary Museum in Minsk that housed pro-democracy NGOs and published an independent newspaper. He was elected to the Minsk City Council and served as secretary and then deputy chairman of the Belarusian Popular Front. In 2003, the Supreme Court of Belarus declared Viasna illegal, but Belarus’s leading human rights center never stopped its activities. In 2011 Bialiatski was thrown in jail for four and a half years on trumped-up charges of tax evasion. A worldwide campaign on his behalf led to his release from prison in 2014. Until 2016, he served as vice president of the International Federation for Human Rights. Read more