Jailed Nobel Prize winner goes on trial

MOSCOW: Jailed Nobel Prize winner Ales Bialiatski went on trial in Minsk on Thursday in what supporters see as a bid to clamp down on Viasna, Belarus’s top rights group, which he founded.

Mr Bialiatski, who was co-awarded last year’s Nobel Peace Prize, founded Viasna (Spring), the country’s most prominent rights group, in 1996.

He and his associates Valentin Stefanovich and Vladimir Labkovich could be seen in the defendants’ cage in the courtroom at the start of the hearing, images released by Russian news agency RIA Novosti showed.

He was sitting on a bench wearing a black hoodie, green trousers and sneakers. The two other defendants sat on either side of a bench behind him, looking solemn in the cage guarded by four armed policemen.

Mr Bialiatski, 60, and his associates were jailed after large-scale demonstrations against the regime in 2020, when authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko claimed victory in elections denounced as fraudulent by the international community.

Backed by Russian leader Vladimir Putin, Mr Lukashenko cracked down on the opposition movement, jailing his critics or pushing them into exile.

A fourth defendant, Dmitry Solovyov, is being tried in absentia after he fled to Poland despite a travel ban.

“I do not trust this trial and what will happen in it... It is a fake trial,” he told AFP, calling the charges “absurd” and dismissing the procedure as “theatre”.

“There is no law in Belarus, no rule of law. The process is entirely controlled by a gangster government,” he said.

The high-profile trial will be followed by those of independent journalists as well as Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, the leader of the opposition movement, who lives in exile.

Mr Bialiatski, Mr Stefanovich and Mr Labkovich have been in detention since July 2021, initially on charges of tax evasion.

Viasna said in November that the rights campaigners now stand accused of smuggling a “large amount of cash” into Belarus to allegedly fund opposition activities.