Belarus court jails Nobel laureate Bialiatski for 10 years
>> A court on Friday sentenced Belarus' top human rights advocate and one of the winners of the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize to 10 years in prison, the latest move in a yearslong crackdown on dissent that has engulfed the ex-Soviet nation since 2020.
The harsh punishment of Ales Bialiatski and three of his colleagues was delivered in response to massive protests over a 2020 election that gave authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko a new term in office.
Lukashenko, a longtime ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin who backed Putin's invasion of Ukraine, has ruled the ex-Soviet country with an iron fist since 1994. More than 35,000 people were arrested, and thousands were beaten by police amid the protests, the largest ever held in the country.
Belarus is an outlier in its support of the year-old Russian invasion, with other countries in the region not backing Moscow publicly.
Bialiatski and his colleagues at the human rights center he founded were convicted of financing actions violating public order and smuggling, the center reported Friday.
Valiantsin Stefanovich
was given a nine-year sentence; Uladzimir Labkovicz seven years; and Dzmitry Salauyou was sentenced in absentia to eight years in prison.
During the trial, which took place behind closed doors, the 60-year-old Bialiatski and his colleagues were held in a caged enclosure in the courtroom. They have spent a year and nine months behind bars since their arrest.
In the photos from the courtroom released Friday by Belarus' state news agency Belta, Bialiatksi, clad in black clothes, looked wan, but calm.
All four activists have maintained their innocence, the Human Rights Center Viasna said after the verdict. Viasna is Belarusian for “spring.”
In his final address to the court, Bialiatski urged the authorities to “stop the civil war in Belarus.” He said it became obvious to him from the case files that “the investigators were fulfilling the task they were given: to deprive Viasna human rights advocates of freedom at any cost, destroy Viasna and stop our work.”
Exiled Belarusian opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya called the verdict “appalling.”
“We must do everything to fight against this shameful injustice (and) free them,” Tsikhanouskaya tweeted Friday.